You may have read about some hardworking, smart, and civic-minded students who, back in 2011 and 2012, fought to keep their local river park open. Fought and won, actually. Well, students from that same school, Grass Valley Charter in Grass Valley, Calif., are now on to another battle -- with the help of students from other area schools, they want to push Nevada County to put a ban on single-use plastic bags and start charging for paper bags. These kids are unstoppable.

They are starting their campaign in the county seat, Nevada City, and made their desires known at a Nevada City Council meeting on May 8 when several of them presented some rather sobering research they have done on the subject of single-use plastic bags. One kid talked about the Pacific gyres, massive globs of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, and the effect this was having on the health of the oceans in general and most acutely, on sea life. Another pointed out that Californians use 400 plastic bags every second. Another read a list of the 75 California communities that have already made similar proposed laws around single-use plastic bags and urged Nevada County to join them. Another posed the question, "Do you really want me to grow up in a world without sea turtles?" Who could say yes to that?

You're probably not clueless enough to think real life hippos are cute and cuddly, but did you know hippos are Africa's deadliest animal? Paul Templer, a river guide showing tourists the sights near Victoria Falls, near the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia back in 1996, found this out the hard way when he almost lost his life inside a hippo's mouth.

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.

UPDATE: Call off the snail-hunting committee! The giant snail in question is not a giant African snail but a rosy wolfsnail, which is considerably more benign and also sounds more like a Doctor Who reference.

Houston, Texas, is the latest place to find itself the unlucky host to a rather large African snail, which, sadly, does not have any plans to benefit its newly acquired habitat. A woman working in a Houston garden stumbled on a single snail, but officials fear this was only one snail among more, and possibly many.

In case you were under the misapprehension that being a giant African snail involves a minimum of nefarious activity, well, sorry. These snails are pretty evil, even if they don't mean to be.

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.

When people camp, they often turn into even bigger slobs than they are in real life. Between the beers, flashlight batteries, water bottles, and marshmallow packaging, they generate and leave behind a lot of crap. So, the people at Glad, who make trash bags, thought to themselves, "How might we enhance the camping experience, encourage people to pick up after themselves, and also, let's be honest, promote our brand?" The result: a tent that can be turned into a garbage bag.

Brooklyn Police descended upon a Lefferts Avenue apartment building this Wednesday, responding to a report that there were marijuana plants on the building's roof. The report came from the building's superintendent, but the cops didn't check it out first. They should've, because the plants in question were not pot plants but tomato plants. For the curious:

As a former New York City dweller (I won't risk the ire of people who feel like you need to live there since birth to be called a New Yorker) now living in relatively inexpensive, spacious, and rural splendor in NorCal boy, oh, boy did I chortle my way through this blog of thoroughly shitty, almost uninhabitable New York City rooms. Seriously, only look at these if you're feeling kind of stable or in a good mood. Definitely do not look at them if you're a dancer/writer/actor/urban farm intern trying to make your dreams come true in the Big Apple. …

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.