Yes, sure, fine, it is possible to get a somewhat healthy sandwich at Subway. It will have watery, shredded lettuce on it, and peppers, and maybe avocado. It will taste like nothing. And let's be real: That is not what people are ordering at Subway. They are ordering the foot-long Italian sub, with its layers of (relatively) delicious, fatty meat. Or they are ordering the Big Philly Cheesesteak.

The result of these choices is that, despite Subway's enormously successful advertising campaign pitching it as a healthy fast-food alternative, the chain is feeding just as much crappy food to people as McDonald's is. Or, as the New York Daily News reports:

"We found that there was no statistically significant difference between the two restaurants, and that participants ate too many calories at both," public health scholar Dr. Lenard Lesser, who led the study, said in a statement.

TV isn't exactly an environmentally friendly form of entertainment. Ever-improving screens and all their associated gadgets need, according to the law of conspicuous consumption, to be replaced as soon as financially possible once a better model comes along, and they're energy-vampires.

But no matter how much energy they suck up, TVs are still more environmentally friendly than those energy-intensive creations known as children.

And, as Brad Plumer writes at the Washington Post, as a country's TV ownership grows and more women are exposed to media, the fertility rate begins to decline. He explains:

This isn’t as bizarre as it seems. A 2009 paper (pdf) by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that the introduction of cable television “is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility.” It’s far from certain that television alone is driving these changes, but the evidence is suggestive.

Look how this plays out in India, for instance:

A few weeks ago, Noluck Tafuruka was arrested by police in Zimbabwe for possessing a rifle without a license. But he's doing better than his partner, Solomon Manjoro. The two men allegedly snuck into Zimbabwe's Charara National Park with the intention of bagging some valuable wild animals.

But one elephant that they tried to take down had had it up to here with poachers -- and when you’re an elephant, “up to here” is pretty high. The elephant charged Manjoro and trampled him.

Treehugger points out:

In recent years, poaching of elephants and rhinos in wildlife reserves in Africa has spiked dramatically, fueled largely by demand for their prized tusks and horns.

Steel is one of those industries that generates more than its fair share of greenhouse gases -- 5 percent of the world total. But now an MIT scientist has figured out how to make steel without any greenhouse gas emissions whatsoever.

The easiest way to do this would be to make it on the moon. MIT explains:

[MIT professor Donald] Sadoway found that a process called molten oxide electrolysis could use iron oxide from the lunar soil to make oxygen in abundance, with no special chemistry. He tested the process using lunar-like soil from Meteor Crater in Arizona -- which contains iron oxide from an asteroid impact thousands of years ago -- finding that it produced steel as a byproduct.

Sadoway’s method used an iridium anode, but since iridium is expensive and supplies are limited, that’s not a viable approach for bulk steel production on Earth.

There's a reason why Sadoway started out with moon soil: He was working on a grant meant to help figure out how to provide oxygen for future lunar settlers to breathe. And then, while fiddling with that problem -- poof! -- he made steel.

Plants talk to each other. They don't use their words, like our moms and dads taught us to do instead of making faces and grumping around. But when they need to -- particularly when they're under threat -- they let each other know. Scientists have known for a while that plants will send out chemical signals in the air as a warning system, but now they've discovered that plants have a secret underground network of communication, too.

Many plants grow in partnership with mycorrhizal fungi, and, as the BBC reports, a new study found for the first time that those fungal systems transmit messages for the plants whose roots they grow on. When aphids attack one plant in the network, the fungi let the other plants know, and those plants start mounting their defenses.

It works just like any alliance, explains the BBC. Each party gets something out of it:

Here is what Subaru thinks of the subway: It's smelly, full of (horrors) people, and slow. You don't even want to know what the car company has to say about subway commuters. But it's willing to tell you. While you're on the subway.

A Streetsblog reader alerted fellow transit nuts to this ad that the car company ran in Metro, that free newspaper you're handed while headed into the station each morning:

It promises an “odour free ride to work," the end of “obligatory transit conversations with coworkers," and “half off arbitrary and inexplicable transit delays.” Or, as the ad puts it:

While you’re sitting on public transit, just imagine your commute in a new Subaru Impreza. No weird smells, no overhearing awful music, and nobody asking you for spare change.

Many zero-energy, efficient green homes look like boxes. Maybe they're repurposed shipping containers, or maybe they've just got those clean, straight lines that zip off into the future and are so popular today. Either way, they're rarely cozy. But this one, built in Romania, is cozy enough and woodsy enough that we can just see Bilbo Baggins making a spot of tea through its large, high-efficiency, let-the-natural-light-in windows.

Modern, hip Bilbo, obviously. He would wear a scarf and Warby Parkers.

And look how snug it looks at night:

Oh, here's our tea!

Climate change is fixing to make potatoes and wheat and rice plants less productive, but we were supposed to be able to count on cassava. If you're not familiar, cassava is that tree-branch-looking thing that usually gets grouped near the hot peppers, tomatillos, and other ingredients you might need for "Mexican night" in higher-end grocery stores. This one:

It can double for potatoes as a staple crop, and it's less sensitive to heat changes. But now, even this alt-tuber is being snatched away from us. The Associated Press reports that cassava crops are dying:

Here's a new idea about using the power of the crowd to make the world just a little bit better. It's sort of like a Kickstarter, except instead of entrepreneurs asking the crowd to support a project, the crowd asks a business to start one. Once a business commits to positive change, the crowd floods it with patronage so it can afford it.

It's called Carrotmob, and it works like an inverse boycott. Rather than influence businesses by withholding money, customers can influence businesses by giving them money. (You're using a carrot instead of a stick, get it?)

Here's an example.

Have you seen these photos by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio? They show what a family eats for a week in countries around the world. They're a quick and fascinating window in the differences in the quantity and the quality of food people eat.

Just look for a second at all the colors in this Mexican family's food:

And then check out the American family's groceries. Still colorful, yeah, but the colors come from the bright packaging of processed food: