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The Sprint innovation center in Burlingame, Calif. (Credit: Lynn La/CNET) Sprint is eating everyone’s dust. The nation’s third-largest wireless carrier by subscriber base sank to the bottom of a survey conducted by Consumer Reports over cell phone service. Sprint scored “dismal marks” in value, voice, text messaging, and 4G reliability, according to Consumer Reports’ survey released Thursday. Sprint ranked No. 2 behind Verizon Wireless a year ago. Related stories Sprint Easy Pay revives early phone upgrade option NetZero launches 3G mobile broadband via Sprint So who has the superior wireless network, anyway?...

Since the birth of the first “test tube baby” in 1978, more than three million children have been born with the help of reproductive technology. Most of them are healthy. But as a group they’re at a higher risk for low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life. Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, is studying two groups of children—one comprising those conceived naturally, the other made up of children conceived via assisted reproductive technology—to identify epigenetic (changes in gene expression caused by molecular mechanisms other than mutations in the DNA sequence itself) differences among them....

Choosing a line at the grocery store can be surprisingly daunting. You can pick the shortest queue and avoid customers with large orders or coupons, yet still feel like your cashier is the slowest. But new research suggests that you may still be on the fast track, provided that line is dedicated to just one cashier. Previous researchers suspected that a single line leading up to multiple cashiers—the system many ticket sellers and big box stores use—could be maximally efficient....

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American’s is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the “Goldilocks” zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets. Or noted the accumulating evidence suggesting that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to retrieve natural gas is likely to contaminate water supplies. (Final New York State regulations, expected in mid-2012, could determine the future of fracking in the U....

A toxin produced by marine algae is inflicting brain damage on sea lions along California’s coast, causing neurological and behavioral changes that can impair their ability to navigate in the sea and survive in the wild, scientists said on Monday. Brain scans on 30 California sea lions detected damage in the hippocampus, a brain structure associated with memory and spatial navigation, in animals naturally exposed to the toxin known as domoic acid, the researchers said....

The first time it happened, Christine* was only seven years old. Her mother’s live-in boyfriend sexually assaulted her, beginning an abusive relationship that lasted more than two years. When a friend of the family figured out what was going on, the friend informed Christine’s mom, who refused to believe it, despite her daughter’s confirmation. Soon afterward, a social services worker confronted the family, and Christine’s abuser fled. Christine never saw the man again, but it was not the end of her experience with sexual trauma....

By Laura Zuckerman(Reuters) - Federal and state wildlife managers of grizzly bears in the Yellowstone National Park area recommended on Wednesday that U.S. Endangered Species Act protections be lifted for the animals, a decision that would open the way for them to be hunted.Yellowstone’s grizzlies, now classified as a threatened species, were briefly removed from protected status by the federal government in 2007, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that the outsized, hump-shouldered bears had made a healthy comeback....

JEFFREY IS JUST NOT interested in elementary school anymore. He doesn’t retain what he is taught, and his grades are bad. At recess he avoids classmates and keeps to himself. He knows his parents are disappointed in him, too. His teacher finally recommends that he be taken to a child psychiatrist for evaluation. The therapist administers a special intelligence test, and Jeffrey turns out to have an IQ of 150—far above the average for his age....

Growing population and increasing demand for higher living standards have led to the overuse of water resources. More recently the management of watersheds has been threatened by the impacts of climate change on the water cycle. In the face of these challenges water companies and agribusinesses need to seek solutions. The editors of Scientific American, Nature and Nature Climate Change (all part of Nature Publishing Group) have teamed up to analyze the problems posed by a drier future and explore the possible solutions....

As a sociologist, J. Gordon Arbuckle Jr. spends a lot of time studying what shapes farmers’ views and responses to climate change. It’s a subject that has not gotten much attention, even as more research focuses on how to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and how to make farming more resilient to the impacts of extreme weather. “Our research so far has shown pretty clearly that although most farmers believe that climate change is occurring, a minority attribute it to human activity,” said Arbuckle, an associate sociology professor at Iowa State University....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume the physical spaces we inhabit are different. The data broker industry doesn’t see it that way. To them, even the act of walking down the street is a legitimate data set to be captured, catalogued and exploited. This slippage between the digital and physical matters not only because of privacy concerns—it also raises serious questions about ethics and power....

In one sense, science educators have it easy. The things they describe are so intrinsically odd and interesting — invisible fields, molecular machines, principles explaining the unity of life and origins of the cosmos — that much of the pedagogical attention-getting is built right in. Where they have it tough, though, is in having to combat an especially resilient form of higher ed’s nemesis: the aptly named (if irredeemably clichéd) ‘preconceived idea....

NOVEMBER 1960 Radical Husbandry “Disastrous experience has shown that the habitats afforded by Africa are brittle and susceptible to ruin. The monumental failure of the earthnut (peanut) project in Tanganyika—a megalomaniac pipe-dream advanced in ignorance of the plainest facts about African soils—is well known. Where the vegetation of the great African plateau is replaced by crop plants, many soils either set rock-hard or erode, and carrying capacity declines. The record supports one radical conclusion....

Spider courtship is a risky business. In some species, females routinely decide that they would rather eat a male than mate with him, and researchers have struggled for decades to understand why. A recent experiment with a type of Spanish wolf spider suggests that the reason may depend on the spider’s personality. A virgin spider cannot be sure how many chances she will have to mate. Every male could be her last, and if she eats all of them, she will never reproduce....

Bubbles percolating up through a freshly poured glass of champagne do more than just tickle the tongue, according to a new study. A team of European researchers, publishing in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that the bubbles in sparkling wine drag compounds that activate smell receptors to the surface of the sparkling wine and then shoot them upward where a taster can easily encounter them. (Although “champagne” technically refers to sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France, all effervescent wines should be subject to the same mechanism....

The cells responsible for cancer’s spread — and for most deaths from cancer — may have a fatal weakness according to studies in mice: a reliance on certain fats to fuel their invasion. It is a difficult and hazardous undertaking for a cancer cell to uproot itself, travel through the bloodstream and take hold in an entirely different part of the body. (Non-cancerous cells are often programmed to self-destruct if they leave the tissue they live in....

Groundwater extraction for fish farms can cause land to sink at rates of a quarter-meter a year, according to a study of China’s Yellow River delta. The subsidence is causing local sea levels to rise nearly 100 times faster than the global average. Global sea levels are rising at about 3 millimeters a year owing to warming waters and melting ice. But some places are seeing a much faster rise — mainly because of sinking land....

Psychiatric disorders can be debilitating and often involve a genetic component, yet, evolution hasn’t weeded them out. Now, recent work is beginning to reveal the role of natural selection—offering a peek at how the genetic underpinnings of mental illness has changed over time. Many psychiatric disorders are polygenic: they can involve hundreds or thousands of genes and DNA mutations. It can be difficult to track how so many genetic regions evolved, and such studies require large genome data sets....

HIV appears to wear out the immune system. Killer T cells that would typically proliferate to ward off an infection instead languish under the HIV onslaught. Two independent teams of researchers have uncovered the cause of this failure, tracing it to a particular molecular pathway known as Programmed Death-1, or PD-1. Earlier research by Rafi Ahmed of Emory University found that such viral infections in mice stall the innate immune response by flicking on the PD-1 switch, which keeps the T cells from functioning....

Even the most trivial of emergency-room trips can quickly add up. Going in for an upper respiratory infection averages more than $1,000. A urinary tract infection can set patients back thousands of dollars. But before Obamacare came on the scene, New Jersey physician Jeffrey Brenner was already working on innovative ways to slash health-care costs. He scoured health-care billing data at local hospitals and discovered that a small number of “super utilizers” clustered in certain geographic areas were responsible for the bulk of health-care costs in Camden, N....