Word from New Zealand Zimbabwe is that a religious sect there — which believes in prayer over vaccinations — may be responsible for the deaths of over one hundred children from measles.

I believe people have the right to practice their religious beliefs… up until they start to hurt others. It has been proven over and again that prayer does nothing to heal disease over the placebo effect, while vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of people. That’s math I can do pretty easily.

If this story is true, I certainly hope that the people involved are introduced to the inside of a jail cell for a long, long time. They can happily pray there all they want, and on the outside those children can get the vaccinations that will save their lives.

A pioneering deep-sea robot, which could function unmanned and untethered to a surface ship, was lost at sea this week. The loss of the 15-year-old Autonomous Benthic Explorer, or ABE, comes as a blow to scientists who study the ocean’s floor. ABE could stay under water for an entire day; it ventured into some of the most remote and risky places on earth, making detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges and was the first autonomous vehicle to locate hydrothermal vents [The Boston Globe]. That’s why it earned a spot on Wired magazine’s list of “The 50 Best Robots Ever.”

ABE was on its 222nd research dive, studying a hydrothermal vent it had discovered off the coast of Chile on the Pacific floor, when all contact was lost with its surface vessel Melville. Scientists suspect that one of the glass spheres that helped keep ABE buoyant imploded. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who designed and built the $1 million vehicle, believe that this implosion–almost two miles undersea and under pressure of more than two tons per square inch-would have caused other spheres in ABE to implode, destroying on-board systems and leaving the robot stranded at the bottom of the ocean floor.

At the time of its loss, ABE, who was brought out of retirement as its replacement Sentry was on another expedition, was researching the Chile Triple Junction–the only place on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge is being pushed beneath a continent in a deep ocean trench [The Boston Globe]. Scientists and engineers on the ABE team reported that after a smooth launch, the final dive started normally. “ABE actively homed to its assigned position, reached the seafloor, released its descent weights, then leveled off to check its ballast. After this point, we received no more acoustic returns from the vehicle on either of its two transponders,” they said. This is when they think they lost ABE. Scientists clarified that this incident had nothing to do with the earthquake activity off the coast of Chile.

ABE was first launched in 1995 and revolutionized deep sea research; it was the precursor to today’s most sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The unmanned, untethered ABE roamed the ocean floors easily, as it was programmed to maintain a designated course but also to avoid on-course collisions. While navigating some of the most treacherous territory on earth, ABE made detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges and the 40,000-mile undersea volcanic mountain chain at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates where new seafloor crust is created. It was also the first AUV to locate hydrothermal vents, where hot chemical-rich fluids spew from the seafloor and sustain lush communities of deep-sea life. ABE explored seamounts, undersea volcanoes, and other areas with harsh, rugged terrain [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution].

Talking about ABE’s watery end, Chris German, National Deep-Submergence Facility chief scientist said: “Abe was a vehicle that we’ll always have fond memories of— it was a world-beater in its day… In a way, it’s fitting that its demise comes on the job, and that it has gone to be recycled through the Chile subduction zone” [Nature blog].

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Image: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

As the deadly facial cancer that has drastically reduced the population of Tasmanian devils continues to spread through the species, the main hope for scientists trying to save them from extinction has been to hunt for devils that might be resistant to the disease, and to try to take advantage of that immunity. Reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kathy Belov and her team say they may finally have done just that: Some devils from northwest Tasmania, they say, are genetically distinct from the rest and could be resistant to the disease.

Belov says that most Tasmanian devils have immune systems so closely related that they’re all susceptible to the disease, which spreads when the devils bite each other on the face and leave behind tumor cells. The bitten devils’ immune systems don’t recognize the tumor cells as foreign, allowing them to take hold. Scientists have given the iconic marsupial as little as 25 years left if efforts are not made to solve the cancer riddle. The population has dwindled by a whopping 70 per cent since the first reported case of devil facial tumour disease in 1996 [Sydney Morning Herald]. Previous research showed that the marsupials are more socially linked that researchers initially believed, which is bad news for those trying to contain the disease.

However, Belov’s findings provide some hope. While earlier studies had looked at devils in eastern Tasmania, this time they took a wider sampling of 400 devils across the state. Twenty percent of those were found to be genetically different from the eastern devils, and so far have not caught the disease [AP]. Belov believes these resistant devils may be able to identify the cancer cells as foreign, which triggers their immune systems to mount a defense. She notes that the situation is still dire, but adds that “now we can say that we’ve got a glimmer of hope. There may be some animals that may survive this epidemic” [AP].

Hopefully those findings will hold true; a few years ago researchers thought they’d found the first disease-resistant devil, which they named Cedric, but it didn’t pan out. Cedric caught the disease in December of 2008.

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Image: flickr/JLplusAL

The South by Southwest Interactive festival is about to roar into gear down in Austin, and DISCOVER just couldn’t miss out on the chance to mix and mingle with the leet ranks of hackers, gamers, geeks, and entrepreneurs.

So tomorrow (that’s Friday) at 5 pm, DISCOVER’s own Web editor extraordinaire, Amos Zeeberg, will moderate a panel discussion titled, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games.”

Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future?

The panelists:

Lucy Bradshaw, with the video game giant Electronic Arts, worked as an executive producer for blockbuster games like Spore and The Sims 2. Spore was a favorite with science geeks, since the game characters evolve from microorganisms to complex animals before building societies and taking to space.

Tiffany Barnes, a professor of computer science, builds video games that teach introductory computer science. She’s interested in “harnessing the inherent motivation in video games” for more constructive purposes–like getting students to do their homework.

Neuroscience prof James Bower will explain why he started Whyville, a massively popular virtual world for kids. The educational site reportedly has a player base of more than 5 million users, who learn about everything from science to business to geography.

Anne Collins McLaughlin investigates how video games (including World of Warcraft and Wii Boom Box) can improve elder cognition at the Gains Through Gaming Lab.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by for insights on whether gaming can save the world!

DISCOVER hit the airwaves yesterday. First, Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell appeared on Fox News to talk NASA and Mars—specifically the agency’s idea for “Tumbleweeds,” or inexpensive round explorers that could bound around the surface of the Red Planet, tossed by the wind. Given the uncertain state of NASA funding, Powell says, the future of exploration could look a lot like these intrepid little bots:

Secondly, if you stayed up late enough to catch the end of “The Colbert Report,” you saw Sean Carroll—who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance—talking time, the multiverse, and his new book From Eternity to Here. Besides surviving the cauldron that is talking to Colbert while still hitting some key scientific points, Carroll also accidentally thinks up a great title for an album:

Check out Carroll’s cover story for the March issue of DISCOVER, “The Real Rules for Time Travelers.”

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