Natasha Frost

It’s one of the most valuable but under-appreciated substances on Earth, and it’s trickling through our fingers. For centuries, we’ve been trying to work out how to reuse our water and get it to those who need it most. Though we’re a ways off using colossal hydro-cannons as a means of water transportation, many of the solutions of yesteryear now don’t seem so remote after all.

This is why we can’t have nice things. After a contentious diplomatic trip to France, Donald Trump fired off a series of rambling tweets about the host nation—its military history, its commitment to NATO, its weather. And then he remembered French wine.

Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the tech sector, in the US, and in the world. And if present trends continue, he’s about to get a whole lot richer: Over the past 12 months, he doubled his net worth, at a rate completely unlike any other billionaire. Some calculations suggest his wealth may be growing at $260 million per day, which would bring his wealth to slightly under $200 billion by the end of 2018.

The 7 train is safe. Well, perhaps. A memorandum from New York officials teases a glamorous alternative to the already overstuffed subway line that serves Amazon’s new Queens neighborhood: Jumping in a helicopter.

It may not affect customers this year, or the next, or possibly even the one after that. But if rumors are true, the days of menthol cigarettes and e-cigarettes could be numbered.

Canadian intelligence officers have now listened to the grisly audio recording of journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi’s death, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Speaking to journalists in Paris today (Nov. 12), Trudeau said he had not heard the recordings personally, but had spoken to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about it over the weekend.

On its 13th page, a forthcoming paper in the journal Annals of Tourism Research makes a bold prophecy: People are going to have sex in driverless cars—and probably sell it, too.

It was supposed to be the measurement system for all people, in all places, for all time—one which used the natural world as its basis. But in the centuries since king Louis XVI of France first tasked a group of scientists to help him develop a new system of measurement, many of the foundations of the metric system have been shown to be fundamentally unsound. Few features of the system have been more troublesome than the measurement standard for the kilogram, which may change for good after a vote coming up this week at the annual General Conference on Weights and Measures.

It’s a problem previously more common to drug cartels: How do you move high-risk substances between one place and the next? In the murky world of international drug trafficking, past solutions have involved catapults to hurl packages over borders, or fake buttocks with compartments to hide drugs. Others take their chances with FedEx.

In 1822, a ragtag band of eight inmates escaped from a brutal penal colony in Tasmania, Australia. They descended upon the island’s hostile pine and myrtle forests, but quickly found themselves lost and starving.

No excuses, no exemptions, no opt-outs: Scottish schools will soon be required to put LGBTQ history on the curriculum, after the country’s ministers accepted the full recommendations of the Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) campaign. Students will learn about the history of LGBTQ equality, how to tackle homophobia and transphobia, and the nuances of LGBTQ identity, in all its forms, going beyond the LGBT-inclusion to be introduced in sex education in Wales.

Turkish investigators have found traces of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals in a well at the Saudi consul general’s home in Istanbul, a source at the Turkish attorney general’s office has told Al Jazeera.

Now that the US midterm elections are over, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is finally resigning from his post as the state’s top election official.

This year’s costumes at the Quartz office Halloween party tended towards the classic: a Girl Scout, Princess Leia (and Yoda the dog), Weird Al Yankovic. (The costumes of visiting children, lured in by the promise of desk-side trick-or-treating, were similarly wholesome—a tiny fireman, a human strawberry, BB8—albeit rather more adorable.)

By the end of this month, people over the age of 21 will have the right to recreationally smoke, eat, or otherwise ingest marijuana in 10 American states, following successful state propositions in yesterday’s midterm elections. In a further 22 states, the drug is now legal for medical usage.

Voters in five states today (Nov. 6) had the opportunity to have their say in a number of state-based propositions relating to recreational and medical marijuana use. The success of such bills may be seen as supporting evidence for federal legalization down the line, even while states such as North Dakota made their misgivings known.

After the results of one of its stranger ballot initiatives, Florida will be revising its state constitution to ban two seemingly unrelated bad habits: fossil-fuel drilling and the use of e-cigarettes in indoor workplaces. With more than 80% of the votes now counted, well over the required 60% of voters said yes to the state’s Amendment 9.

Rudy Booker, a New York voter, has visited the same polling station for 15 years. But on the day before the Nov. 6 election, she received a text from the voter-registration organization TurboVote, telling her the voting location had changed. She ignored the text. At the station, Booker encountered dozens of angry people who’d been sent a similar message, and were now in the wrong place.

This year, Americans really, really want to vote. An estimated 40 million people have already cast their ballot via early voting, according to the U.S. Election Project, up from 27.5 million early voters in the 2014 midterm elections. But high turnout at the polls has today (Nov. 6) caused headaches for voters and poll workers alike, with polling stations reporting hours-long lines, full ballot boxes, or running out of ballots altogether.

Texas resident Brianna Smith, who lives in Katy, a Houston suburb, turned up 15 minutes before the polls opened at 7 am to vote this morning (Nov. 6). She wasn’t able to do so for nearly two hours, because of problems with the machine that gives voters their tickets. The lines were “wrapped around the block,” she told Quartz, with some voters forced to leave to go to work or school.

It’s hungry work, waiting. But there’s a sliver of light for voters standing in line to cast their ballot today—and it comes with hot cheese.

The day of the US midterms is upon us, and the world is watching to see whether Democrats will be able to break Republicans’ stronghold on Congress. But voters will also be making a lot of important decisions at the state level, weighing proposed legal changes that could affect everything from reproductive rights to minimum wage. Here are a few of the most important topics on the ballots:

If you’re voting in the US midterm elections and you aren’t sure where to go, there are ample options to find out where your polling station is. You could check out HeadCount’s Polling Place Finder, while individual states such as Texas and California have guides as well. And there’s another, even simpler way: Google it.

With just hours to go before the midterm elections, US President Donald Trump was tweeting up a storm about some of 2018’s most hotly contested races, as well as those the Republican party is most afraid that it may lose.