Red, white and blue aside, how green will this weekend’s firework festivities be? Not very, argue some.

The dazzling displays owe their colors to traces of metal compounds: strontium for red, aluminum or magnesium for white, copper for blue and barium for green.

What happens when these chemicals come raining down on rivers, lakes and people? “Everyone at or downwind of a pyrotechnic display is getting subjected to levels of these metals that aren’t natural,” Los Alamos Natural Laboratory chemist David Chavez recently told Discovery News.

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A word to the wise: stay out of the emergency room this long weekend.

The reason has nothing to do with the so-called July phenomenon – when a new crop of doctors in training arrive at your local hospital – and everything to do with alcohol, firecrackers, fistfights and reckless drivers.

July is the first month of the academic medical year, and marks the arrival of a new crop of medical residents and second-year med students taking their first crack at patients on the hospital floor. 

Although some have feared that the arrival of newbie docs would correspond with clumsy misdiagnoses and an increase in patient mortality, study after study has shown the July phenomenon is total bunk. “It’s good hypothesis that hasn’t really been born out by the empirical data,” says Gary Rosenthal, an internist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and the Iowa City VA Medical Center, who has studied the question.

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University of Quebec's Team OMER found inspiration in nature—penguins, actually—as they set two international speed records last week at the International Human-Powered Submarine Races held at the U. S. Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock test tank in Bethesda, Md.

Team OMER, composed of students from the school's Ecole de Technologie Superieure in Montreal, drove two propellerless submarines to victory (winning $1,000 per race in the process) using thrust delivered from a pair of carbon fiber oars resembling the wings of the tuxedoed bird.

OMER 6, a one-person submarine, achieved a speed of 4.916 knots (5.65 miles per hour), beating the previous 4.642-knot (5.34-mile-per-hour) speed record for subs without a propeller. The two-person OMER 7 sub hit a top speed of 5.133 knots (5.90 miles per hour).

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John Reece Roth, 71, a prominent plasma physicist was sentenced to four years in prison for 18 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and violations of the Arms Export Control Act, after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones.

“The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,” David Kris of the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a statement, “We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.”

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached its destination just last week, is already showing its stuff.

The space agency switched on the LRO's cameras two days ago and today released the first images from the orbiter's mission, which is intended to pave the way for the return of astronauts to the moon.

The LRO snapped surface images near the Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) in the moon's southern hemisphere as day gave way to night. The intense shadowing caused by the sun's low angle makes for a dramatic moonscape that exaggerates the contours of the surface features.

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Although China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) earlier this week granted PC makers a reprieve from having to include the Green Dam-Youth Escort Internet filtering software with every PC sold in the country, the government today made clear that it's only a matter of time before the mandate is reinstated.

Citing an anonymous MIIT official, the state-run China Daily newspaper reports that large domestic PC makers, including Lenovo Group, Tsinghua Tongfang, Founder Technology Group and Haier Group, will "install the filter as they were told." Some manufacturers have included a disclaimer with new PCs that the makers would not be responsible for damage caused by Green Dam, which has been criticized as insecure, flawed and intrusive.

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The arid Negev Desert in southern Israel is no match for the desert rhubarb, which plant researchers say has found a unique way to water itself.

The plant (Rumex hymenosepalus) has mastered collecting moisture in a region that receives just two to six inches [50.8 to 152.4 millimeters] of rainfall a year. According to Simcha Lev-Yadun, an author of the study published in Naturwissenschaften, the plant captures water from rains so light they don’t even wet the soil.

The plant does it with large round leaves and a long vertical root, odd adaptations for desert plants. More often desert flora has small leaves--think cactus--to minimize water loss, and two types of roots to maximize water capture.

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Bigger had always been better for sheep living on the remote, windswept Scottish island of Hirta.

So why have the animals been getting smaller lately? One possible explanation, say scientists studying the sheep, is climate change.

An international team of researchers tracked the population of Hirta’s Soay sheep over 24 years and found that average body size mysteriously shrank 5 percent, despite the apparent evolutionarily benefits of being larger. They report their findings today in the journal Science.

“As climate changes, the way selection operates changes as well,” says Tim Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and principal investigator on the study. The island’s longer springs and warmer winters mean less competition for food because there’s more of it. Living conditions are also better for weak animals. “Sheep that are a little bit smaller are no longer as disadvantaged as they were when winters were longer and harsher,” he says.

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Those ants crawling across your picnic table this weekend might be members of a massive, transnational ant mafia, recently reported by researchers in Japan and Spain.

Billions of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) from North America, Europe and Japan are not only interrelated, but when introduced to foreign cousins they get along like old amigos—an unusual reaction for this otherwise hostile breed—reports the BBC.

The conquering colony is composed of three distinct super-colonies—one in California (560 miles, or 900 kilometers, long), one along the Mediterranean coast (3,700 miles, or 6,000 kilometers, long) and one in Kobe, Japan—that all share similar genetic make-ups, and therefore familiar chemical cues.

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Forget about climate change for a moment, the biggest threats to the world’s imperiled species are deforestation, pollution, poaching and invasive species.

Those are the findings of an analysis by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Published every four years, the report examines the state of globally threatened species.

Habitat loss and pollution pose the greatest extinction risk for currently threatened amphibians, while the deadly chytrid fungus remains a lesser but still potent threat. As for threatened mammals, habitat loss and poaching may be the biggest factors wiping them off the map.

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