Alastair Bland

Columbia? Taken. Mississippi? Taken. Sacramento? El Niño? Marlin? Grizzly? Sorry, they're all taken.

Virtually every large city, notable landscape feature, creature and weather pattern of North America — as well as myriad other words, concepts and images — has been snapped up and trademarked as the name of either a ...

What's the healthiest libation for ringing in the New Year?

Beer, says Charlie Bamforth, a professor of brewing sciences at the University of California, Davis. Though it's been blamed for many a paunch, it's more nutritious than most other alcoholic drinks, Bamforth says.

"There's a reason people call it ...

Greeks have loved coffee for centuries. Today, they drink more per capita than even the French and Italians, and almost as much as Americans, and they may spend hours each week in cafes. They're proud of their coffee too, and if you call their rich, gritty signature brew "

In San Francisco, there's a new program aimed at property owners who can resist the temptations of the sky-high real estate development market and turn their vacant lots into agricultural oases instead.

Many sustainability advocates have applauded the creation of the tax incentive, announced in August. But critics say there ...

The ongoing California drought has pitted wild salmon against farmers in a fight for water. While growers of almonds, one of the state's biggest and most lucrative crops, enjoy booming production and skyrocketing sales to China, the fish, it seems, might be left high and dry this summer—and maybe ...

A great white attacks a submersible "SharkCam" deployed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, shattering its teeth on the metal biteproof cylinder. Off Baja California, the crew of a research boat feeds a single great white 400 pounds of tuna in a boyish science test to see how ...

Discovery Channel set viewership records in 2013 as millions of people tuned in to watch sharks feed, sharks attack, extinct giant sharks and researchers catch and tag sharks. Discovery's "Shark Week" returned on Sunday, and this year, to the dismay of conservationists, restaurants and markets nationwide are feeding ...

The famously grueling cycling race involves about 2,200 miles of furious pedaling, huge mountain climbs and downhill sprints at 50-plus miles per hour. But the Tour de France, now in its final days, is also an epic marathon of eating.

The cyclists now competing in the 101^st rendition of the ...

From red to white to orange to blue, fish flesh can land almost anywhere on the color spectrum.

What's behind this huge variation? A lot of things — from genetics to bile pigments. And parsing the rainbow can tell us something about where a fish came from, its swimming routine ...

With more breweries per capita than any U.S. city, Asheville, N.C., has become a sort of Napa Valley of beer. And at the third annual Asheville Beer Week this week, this tight-knit beer community is strutting its stuff with tastings of barrel-aged sour beers and ...

What if a single taste of one fruit — in this case, the durian — changed the course of your entire life?

That's what happened to Lindsay Gasik and Rob Culclasure, a young couple who visited an Asian grocery store in Eugene, Ore., in 2009 in search of the football-sized ...

If you've come to treat that daily glass of wine as your fountain of youth, it may be time to reconsider.

The notion that consuming wine and chocolate, two of our favorite vices, could lead to longer, healthier lives is a tantalizing one. Scientists first hinted at ...

It's a fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. Last week the National Climate Assessment report was released detailing the toll climate change is already taking on the United States in terms of droughts, floods, heat waves and changes in agriculture. This report follows on the heals of two others ...

There was once a time when it was easy to throw around the term "craft beer" and know exactly what you were talking about. For decades, craft was the way to differentiate small, independently owned breweries – and the beer they make – from the brewing giants like Coors, Budweiser ...

For centuries, hard apple cider has been made with the fermented juice of apples — nothing more, nothing less. And a lot of cider drinkers and makers — let's call them purists — like it that way.

But a new wave of renegade cider makers in America is shirking tradition ...

True fig lovers are well-practiced in the art of patience. We watch the calendar, dreaming of summer and the fruit's silky, sappy flesh. The season lasts through June and July, with another crop from August to October. And then we're back to almost eight months of oranges, apples and, if ...

For lovers of fatty tuna belly, canned albacore and swordfish kebabs, here's a question: Would you be willing to give them up for several years so that you could eat them perhaps for the rest of your life?

If a new proposal to ban fishing on the open ocean were ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife of 30 years, Lyudmila, are now divorced, the Kremlin confirmed Wednesday.

The divorce was finalized months after the couple announced on national television in June that they intended to end the marriage. At the time, Putin said: "It was a joint decision: we ...

Caviar was once the food of kings and czars — and for a sturgeon, it meant death.

But a new technique of massaging the ripe eggs from a female sturgeon — without killing or even cutting the fish open— could make caviar more abundant, more affordable, and more accessible to ...

Seafood often travels huge distances over many days to reach the people who eat it. And it's often impossible to know where a fillet of fish or a few frozen shrimp came from — and, perhaps more importantly, just how they were caught.

Fortunately, activists are doing the homework for ...