When the Buckeye State Tree Nursery first opened in 2024, Carla Jarvis planted chestnut trees by poking holes in the dirt with her finger.
"I just do that to give them a good spot to start rooting down into," she explained.
Her nascent team had planted around 9,000 trees this way in the first month of the facility's operation.
Since a toxic algal bloom left hundreds of thousands of Toledo-area residents without safe drinking water in 2014, scientists have been working to curb the yearly threat.
A small team is learning how to prevent a tragedy in the basement of a Butler County office building. They're a part of LOSS/DOSS, Local Outreach Suicide Survivors and Drug Overdose Survivor Support Team.
Program director Jennifer MacLean tells the group those who lose loved ones to suicide are more at risk of suicide themselves.
A team of microbiologists has discovered a risk of microbes in intravenous drug use.
Researchers at Bowling Green State University studied the contents of 50 syringes from the Northwest Ohio Safe Services' needle exchange program, where people who use drugs can swap out used needles for clean ones.
Denison University anthropology professor John Soderberg dug himself into a hole.
Well, it was a trench that Soderberg and his team hoped would provide evidence of a long-lost earthen circle built by Indigenous people thousands of years ago.
The United Titanium Bug Zoo at Ohio State University's campus in Wooster is full of creepy, crawly critters in extra large sizes: hairy tarantulas, cave cockroaches and giant millipedes.
But at least one bug among them is much smaller.
"What do you say, maybe two inches long? An inch and a half?" Jeni Filbrun estimated.
When Jalyn Thacker was growing up in southwest Ohio's Adams County, he had to travel over an hour to Cincinnati, Yellow Springs or Portsmouth to get to a Pride event.
But this year, the celebration is much closer to home.
Sweat drips down Gavyn Shumard's forehead as he leans over a Hampshire Down sheep.
He does his best to keep the animal calm, despite the razor moving around its body.
"Sheep shearing is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, like I've done concrete work, I've done commercial roofing," he said.
Staying busy, though, is easy.
For decades, Midwestern cities have struggled to retain residents. As manufacturing jobs left, so did people.
The city of Akron lost one third of its population from 1960 to 2020. In the city of Cleveland, it was 60%. Dayton faced a similar plummet in population – leaving behind shuttered factories and empty storefronts.
Lab analyst Diana Wendelin gently adjusts a slide under a microscope. An enlarged image of a tick comes into focus on her computer screen.
"So, the first thing I'm looking at is called the scutum. This will tell me whether I'm looking at a male tick or female tick," Wendelin explained. "So, because this one only goes about a third of the way down, this is a female tick."
