Dan Charles

Bee deaths may have reached a crisis point for crops

Dan Charles — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:45:28 +0000

According to a new survey of America's beekeepers, almost a third of the country's honeybee colonies did not make it through the winter.

That's been the case, in fact, almost every year since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began this annual survey, six years ago.

Over the past six years, on average, 30 percent of all the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died off over the winter. The worst year was five years ago.

Exploring Coffee's Past To Rescue Its Future

Dan Charles — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:57:19 +0000

At the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica, you can touch the history of coffee — and also, if the optimists have their way, part of its future.

Here, spread across 25 acres, are coffee trees that take you back to coffee's origins.

"The story starts in Africa, no? East Africa," says Eduardo Somarriba, a researcher at CATIE, as we walk through long rows of small coffee trees.

These trees came directly from forests in Africa.

How coffee brings the world together

Dan Charles — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:01:09 +0000

Coffee is more than a drink.

Why chicken wings dominate Super Bowl snack time

Dan Charles — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:33:05 +0000

Take a look at this remarkable graph — is it the stock market? Home sales?

Nope. Click on the blue box in the lower right-hand corner and you'll see that the blue line tracks the number of chicken wings that Americans bought at grocery stores over the last year. See that mighty surge of wing-buying in early February?

The paradox and mystery of our taste for salt

Dan Charles — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:09:27 +0000

Salt is one of those dangerously tasty substances. We add the magical crystals of sodium chloride to almost everything that we cook or bake, and according to many public health experts, we add too much.

They want us to cut back, to lower our risk of heart attacks or strokes.

Yet when you really start looking for ways to do this, you run into a paradox and a scientific puzzle.

First, the paradox.

Monster Beverage under fire as reports link deaths to its energy drinks

Dan Charles — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:17:16 +0000

The Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that it received five reports in the past past three years suggesting that people died after drinking caffeinated energy drinks.

But the agency also cautions that these reports do not add up to proof that the beverages actually caused those deaths.