The concern over the declining honeybee population may be exaggerated, according to a controversial new study that shows their numbers are actually increasing globally. Alarm over a world pollination crisis is thus unfounded, say the researchers who analyzed Food and Agriculture Organization data and found that commercial domesticated bee hives have increased 45 percent in the past 50 years, to match growing demand for honey among a growing human population [AFP].

The study, published in Current Biology, says, "the declines in the U.S.A., some European countries and the former U.S.S.R. are more than offset by large increases elsewhere, including Canada, Argentina, Spain and especially China." The study could help disprove a connection between regional declines, which have been attributed partly to parasitic mites and the general mystery known as colony collapse disorder, and a worldwide trend. But even if global bee populations continue to climb, researchers claim that there won't be enough of them to go around. The real issue is not the honeybee numbers but the increasing work expected of them [CBC], the researchers argue.
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Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them? For thousands of years some people have believed so. But new Brandeis University research in the June 2009 Journal of Religion shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer — the prayer of strangers at a distance — actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.

Intercessory prayer has been the subject of scientific study since at least the nineteenth century, when an English scientist, assuming that kings were prayed for more often than others, sought to find out whether those prayers were answered. He concluded that they were not, but that prayer might be a comfort to the people praying anyway.
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