• Snails fitted with heart monitors help to detect air pollution

    Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP - Getty Images

    Three of the six Achatina snails fitted with heart monitors and motion sensors at the Vodokanal state utilities company on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, Russia on Jan. 27. The snails help to monitor air pollution from an incinerator that burns sewage residue.

    Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP - Getty Images

    An Achatina snail fitted with a heart monitor and motion sensors, which are used to monitor pollution from an incinerator that burns sewage residue at the Vodokanal state utilities company, eats lettuce on Jan. 27.

    By David R Arnott, NBC News

    With a job like that, they definitely deserve a bit of lettuce! 

    From AFP: A Russian waterworks is using six snails as an innovative way to monitor pollution from a incinerator that burns sewage. The Achatina snails, which can reach 20 centimetres in length and are widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, were chosen because "they have lungs and breathe air like humans," the Vodokanal state utilities company said. The snails have been fitted with heart monitors and motion sensors while breathing smoke from the plant.

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    And I thought I'd seen everything.......until now.

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  • Joe Raedle / Getty Images

    Agostino Pezzatini and Luiz Menezes, at right, help push one of the pink snails in an art installation into place Thursday in Miami Beach, Florida. Some of the 45 snails have been beaten, battered, sprayed with graffiti, and thrown into Biscayne Bay since they were installed in mid-November by an international artistic collective Cracking Art Group and Italy's Galleria Ca d'Oro. Gloria Porcella, who owns Galleria Ca' d'Oro, which is sponsoring the snails, says that are periodically moved from one location to another, and that the snails have been on display in Rome and Paris without the levels of vandalism she's seen in Miami Beach. She hopes there'll be no more incidents before the public show ends on January 3.

    Pink snails disrespected, attacked in Miami

    By Stokes Young, nbcnews.com

    More from the Miami Herald:

    The 45 giant pink snails visiting Miami Beach for Art Basel season were supposed to inspire reflection on the environment and the fast pace of South Florida life.

    Instead, the recycled plastic gastropods have been treated like unwanted tourists -- punched, tagged with graffiti, relocated by county order and, in one case, tossed into Biscayne Bay.

    "Every morning I wake up with a disaster," said Gloria Porcella, co-owner of Galleria Ca' d'Oro, which has backed the Italian art collective behind the 45 snails' appearance. (full story)