If there was any surprise in the first 90-minute presidential debate, it was President Obama's apathetic performance, not Mitt Romney's energetic and assertive pounding of the commander in chief.

Population censuses aren't normally something to get excited over. But for Bosnia, a nation that hasn't counted its own people in over two decades and has its eye on becoming part of the European Union, even a pilot census is of great importance. No formal national count has taken place since before the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent ethnic conflict that shocked the world.

Today, Bosnia began a two-week test census, targeting around 15,000 people, in order to gauge how prepared it is for an official, nation-wide census in the spring of 2013.

The nation's poverty rate is as high as it's been in almost two decades. Last year, 1 in 6 Americans was poor — more than 46 million people, including 16 million children.

But on the campaign trail, the issue of poverty has received surprisingly little attention.

When he first ran for president, Barack Obama went to a low-income neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and spoke passionately about hunger and poverty. He repeated Bobby Kennedy's question in 1967: "How can a country like this allow it?"

A President Mitt Romney would make the "military option" a credible threat in the effort to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons by repeatedly saying that it "remains on the table, that it is real" and by making sure that senior officials don't imply otherwise, a top foreign policy adviser to the 2012 Republican presidential nominee tells Morning Edition.

Giving the human papillomavirus vaccine to teenage girls doesn't increase the likelihood that they will be sexually active, according to a new study.

That may help put parents at ease; the notion of vaccinating 11- and 12-year-old girls for a sexually transmitted virus has made some uncomfortable, and is one reason why only a little more than half of teenage girls have had the vaccine.

The universe continues to surprise us. Two citizen scientists have discovered a very rare world: A planet that orbits two stars and has a second pair of stars revolving around it.

Wired explains just how odd this is:

Whenever Tyler Perry is in front of the camera, he's usually behind it as well. A screenwriter, director, producer and star, Perry grew up poor in New Orleans, but he has become a movie phenomenon — he was described in the New Yorker as the most financially successful black man the American film industry has ever known.

Reuters today catches up on a story that's been getting some traction in recent weeks:

An Israeli inventor has come up with a way to make a bicycle almost entirely out of cardboard — and so inexpensively that he thinks retailers would only need to charge about $20 for one.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

Few stories in the 20th century are more tragic than the fate of Cambodia, a small, peaceful country on the sidelines of the war in Vietnam. Cambodia would be invaded by both sides, carpet-bombed by the United States, taken over by murderous Maoists, invaded again by the Vietnamese and left to wither for a decade by a grotesque, international impasse.