The next big machine in the world of science is the Large Hadron Collider, an $8 billion particle accelerator due to start operations late this year on the French-Swiss border. The LHC just might lift the veil on exotic physics such as the "God particle" and the extra dimensions in which we live.

There's yet another next big machine, in a slightly different field: the $13 billion ITER experimental fusion reactor, slated to be built in France by 2015. That could eventually open the door to clean, abundant, relatively safe nuclear power.

So what's the next, next big machine? What future international science project might the United States pursue? As far as the world's leading physicists are concerned, that would be the International Linear Collider - a huge multibillion-dollar installation that would follow up on the leads generated by the LHC. But is it really necessary? And is there really any chance of bringing the project to the United States?

KEK

An artist's conception shows a cutaway view of the future International Linear Collider.

Let's face it: Europe is now becoming the pre-eminent place on the frontiers of physics, with Japan, China, India and other countries competing hard as well. Meanwhile, particle physicists in the United States are preparing to shut down experiments at the SLAC B Factory in 2008, and the Tevatron in 2009.

The prestige gap dates back to 1993, when Congress shut down the partially built Superconducting Super Collider early in its construction phase. Since then, the cost of high-energy physics has risen to the extent that no one country can afford to build state-of-the-art facilities by itself. And it's not clear how much the international science community would trust the United States to follow through on the next, next big machine.

"The United States has to do something to improve its reputation," said Nigel Lockyer, a high-energy physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped write a report on the state of the nation's particle-physics research. "It's already not in good shape. We definitely have to fix that."

Lockyer and other leading physicists sized up the Large Hadron Collider and the International Linear Collider last week during a panel discussion at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Seattle.

The dean of string theorists, Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said physicists would need both colliders to gain deep insights into the mysteries of physics - ranging from extra dimensions and exotic particles to the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

The ILC would actually achieve lower collision energies than the LHC - in the range of 500 billion to 1 trillion electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14 trillion electron volts. But the ILC would deal with electron-positron collisions, which would provide a much clearer picture of the subatomic world than the LHC's proton-proton collisions.

Witten said a collider like the LHC usually provides the "best way to discover new phenomena." However, he added, "it's not necessarily the best way to learn about those new phenomena."

That's why the international community is already talking about what shape the ILC might take, and where it might be built - even if it won't be built until sometime after 2010. Helen Quinn, a theoretical physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, said that if the United States decided to enter the competition for the ILC, the likeliest site would be somewhere around the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, which has housed the nation's biggest accelerators in the past.

Eventually, an international consortium called the Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider will decide where the ILC will go - just as similar consortia worked out the locations for the LHC and ITER in the past. Scientists such as Witten, Quinn and Lockyer are already meeting amongst themselves, as well as with officials at the Energy Department and other agencies, to draw up the best case for America.

To get an overview of the issues involved - in physics as well as politics - you can't do better than "Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time," a report drawn up last year by a committee of the National Research Council and available free online.

You can also refer to these archived MSNBC articles on the current frontiers of physics as well as the search for extra dimensions and the theory of everything. But if you want to delve into a book-length discussion of physics' strange frontiers, here are some recommendations from the three physicists:

• "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene (which was adapted for television by PBS).
• "Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall.
• "The Charm of Strange Quarks" by R. Michael Barnett, Henry Muehry and Helen Quinn. (Guess who suggested that one.)

Online, you'll find great resources at "The Particle Adventure" Web site and at Interactions.org. You can also page through Symmetry magazine. And if you're wondering what the next, next, next big machine might be, I have three words for you: Compact Linear Collider.

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Nine months ago, economist/entrepreneur Sam Dinkin set up an online skill game called Space Shot. People paid $3.50 a shot to forecast the weather, in hopes of winning a future suborbital trip into space. But so far, the competition has yielded no winners - so today Dinkin launched the venture's second stage.

Instead of pay-for-play, the contest is now free for players, and dependent instead on advertising revenue. The offered prizes now include a zero-gravity airplane ride as well as flights on next-generation suborbital, orbital and round-the-moon spacecraft that have not yet been built. And the target market is next-generation as well: Dinkin is hoping to grab the attention of pre-teens who are years away from being able to take their ride to space. Will Space Shot 2.0 fly any higher than 1.0? That all depends on the kids.

Dinkin, who has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona, admits that Space Shot 1.0 taught him a lot about the online marketplace as well as the appetite for spaceflight.

"Being first means that you get to find out the easy way, or the hard way, for everything that happens in the market," he told me today. "A lot of people learned that it's really hard to charge for online content. Well, it's really hard to charge for online skill games. So we're not."

The basic premise for Free Space Shot has been fine-tuned: Contestants still vie against each other to predict the high and low temperatures as well as the humidity and precipitation levels at New York's Central Park on the following day. The winners of each head-to-head contest rise to the next level, or milestone.

To win, say, a zero-G flight, you would have to win 19 straight head-to-head contests. It's kind of like an NCAA basketball bracket, except that there are 524,288 entries on the bottom rung of the bracket. For the higher-level prizes, there'd have to be millions or even billions of entries on the bottom rung.

The suborbital trip would be on Rocketplane Kistler's rocket-jet hybrid plane, and the orbital trip would be on the Kistler K-1 vehicle, also under development by Rocketplane Kistler. The round-the-moon trip would be via Lunar Express, a space-transport system that's been proposed by Constellation Services International. None of these vehicles are yet ready for prime time.

Who on Earth would have the motivation and the time to put so much playing effort into something so speculative? Dinkin is putting his money on the 9- to 12-year-old market. He pointed to statistics indicating that pre-teens can spend several hours a day playing video games - and said the kids represent a coveted market for advertisers.

"At all of the conferences we went to, the people who were most excited about this were not the people who saw the moon landing in the '60s - it was the kids," Dinkin said. "It's intuitive, if you think about it. Their parents tell them they can be astronauts, and they believe it."

"Their attention is worth enough so that, if they believe, we can actually pay for a spaceflight," he said. "Three hours a day, that'll generate hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars of advertising revenues."

Space Shot is gathering together online resources and even lesson plans (focusing on weather prediction) to attract students, parents and teachers to its Web site. The back story behind Space Shot's weather-guessing game also has been tweaked to be more kid-friendly. The old pay-for-play contests will be transitioned over to the new system, with active contestants inserted into an equivalent place in the new brackets, Dinkin said.

I wondered whether some parents might think it unseemly for a Web site to draw kids into an online game, even though there's no money involved. Dinkin replied that Space Shot 2.0 received a positive reception during test runs in Austin, Texas, and Mexico City. To ease grown-ups' concerns, Space Shot says that parents or teachers should sign up for pre-teen players - and notes that young winners would not be able to fly into space until they turn 18.

"We're really, really trying to make it easy for parents to say this is a great idea," Dinkin said.

He said kids already take part in contests ranging from scratch-off games at fast-food restaurants to online video-game tournaments.

"If they're going to play one, this is a particularly good one," Dinkin said of Space Shot. "It's like the Teachers in Space program - this uses an interesting premise to get the kids interested in math and science."

For more background, check out Dinkin's article this week in The Space Review - then let me know what you think of this play by adding your comments below.

Update for 9:35 p.m. ET: Dinkin sent along these additional observations on the issue of kids and the weather prediction game:

"Regarding gambling, our game doesn't cost anything so it doesn't fit the definition of gambling. It also isn't a game of chance. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars researching the weather at the National Weather Service and AccuWeather. Would you say that Willard Scott has no skill in predicting the weather on the TODAY show? Weather prediction is a skill. It's a skill that is not respected, which was part of the premise of the Nicolas Cage movie 'The Weather Man.' One reason for this is cognitive bias; people remember when the weather forecast was wrong and don't remember when it was right. This is an asset for Free Space Shot because the skill must be perceived as one where a kid can do as well as a weatherman, at least sometimes. It is a fine balance because if it is a skill that is so hard that people of average skill perceive they can't be competitive in a tournament, then few will want to play.

"The kids will do better than the weathermen, certainly as a group. I say that as an economics expert. We anticipate making genuine improvements in forecasting. How often do you look up yesterday's weather forecast? These kids will. In aggregate, they will do better than any weather expert, and we plan to provide that forecast to the media and the players.

"Would you ask Willard Scott for me if he is willing to test his mettle against the average prediction for Central Park for 150 Austin middle schoolers for a week? If he wins, Space Shot will take him on a zero-G airplane flight (a $3,750 value) and we will have a second competition: Who can fly in zero-G with your camera crew and keep our breakfast down?

"If he loses, he has to report what the kids say the high and low in Central Park will be for a week on the air, and he has to charter a zero-G airplane for a couple of days (approximately $150,000) so all the kids who competed against him can fly in zero-G."

"What do you say?"

Dinkin's Space Shot may not be a gambling game, but there's no question that Dinkin himself is a gambling man. In fact, I'd be afraid that such a challenge would run afoul of Space Shot's own terms and conditions (see Item 2a). In any case, let this stand as notice to Willard Scott - just in case he's a gambling man, too.

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Calling all fans of space imagery: NASA wants you ... to help judge a couple of contests over the next couple of weeks. And if you want to get your name in the cosmos, the Planetary Society is offering a couple of opportunities. Read on for the details:

• To celebrate the third anniversary of the Mars rover landings, NASA is putting on a contest to select the "People's Choice" image from the twin missions. The winner will be announced Jan. 24, exactly three Earth years after the Opportunity rover landed in Meridiani Planum.
• Sunday marks the second anniversary of the European Huygens probe's landing on Titan, a smog-shrouded moon of Saturn. On the eve of the anniversary, Huygens' old mothership, the Cassini orbiter, will zoom past Titan for a round of radar observations. And it just so happens that NASA is putting on a Cassini photo contest, with next Thursday looming as the voting deadline. The last time this sort of contest was conducted, Huygens' view of Titan's surface ended up as the winner. Which pic will take the prize this time? You decide, we report.
• The Planetary Society is taking names, literally, for inclusion on spacecraft heading to the moon and Mars. But time is running out: You have until the end of the month to send along a message to be engraved on sheets and placed on Japan's Selene moon orbiter. Roughly the same deadline applies to getting your name included on a DVD being sent to the Red Planet aboard NASA's Mars Phoenix lander.

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Back when there were nine planets, you could keep them straight with a cute little memory aid: "My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas." But now, at least according to the International Astronomical Union, there are only eight (planets, that is ... not pizzas): Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Pluto was drummed out of the planet platoon in part because something was finally discovered out on the solar system's edge that was bigger than Pluto: an icy world at first nicknamed Xena, and now dubbed Eris. Does Eris' co-discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, feel bad about Pluto's comedown? If so, he still has a sense of humor about it all, based on his favorite memory aid for the solar system's current lineup: "Mean, very evil men just shortened up nature."

Brown talked a little bit about Pluto and Eris, and a lot more about the other dwarf planets ringing the edge of our solar system, during the final session of the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting on Wednesday. "They're all bodies that are equally as interesting as Pluto," Brown said.

Here are some of the highlights from the talk:

• Based on spectral analysis of the faint light reflected by Pluto, astronomers have concluded that the icy world has polar caps of methane and nitrogen. And when spectral readings came in from Eris as well, astronomers found that the two have similar composition. "It looks just like Pluto," Brown said.
• When Eris was discovered, Brown felt confident that it was larger than Pluto, based on its brightness and distance. He became less confident when he found out that Eris' reflectivity was "absurdly high" - and the current estimate sets Eris' diameter at 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers), just 4 percent wider than Pluto.
• Why is Eris so bright? "I think that this whole planet is covered with a thin layer of frost," Brown said. He said Eris was "the only object we know for sure in the solar system that's large enough to maintain an atmosphere, but eccentric enough that that atmosphere comes and goes."
• Another dwarf planet, called 2005 FY9, could serve as "the Rodney Dangerfield of the larger objects in the outer solar system," Brown said - because it's gotten relatively little respect from planetary scientists. But Brown said it's in an interesting niche of the solar system, because it has methane and even ethane, but no nitrogen. He theorized that 2005 FY9's distance and size allows it to retain hydrocarbons on its surface - but not to have a volatile atmosphere.
• Brown said his "favorite object in the solar system" was the dwarf planet known as 2003 EL61, nicknamed Santa because it was discovered three days after Christmas. It appears to be shaped like a football, and spins end over end. Santa is also notable because it has two tiny moons, orbiting tightly in different planes. "These are the two most strongly interacting satellites of anything we know in the solar system," Brown said.
• "But wait ... there's more," Brown said. His team found other dwarflets that were in similar orbits and had a chemical composition similar to that of 2003 EL61.  "These five other objects are actually the remnants of the icy mantle of EL61," Brown said, and apparently were struck off in a cosmic collision. EL61 and its family are in a particular type of orbit that is fated to become more and more eccentric over time. In, say, 2 billion years, EL61 "may well become a comet."

Brown uses such lore to support his point that you don't have to be a major planet to be interesting. Maybe we should just add the dwarf-planet category to our memory aids: Even if mean, very evil men just shortened up nature ... "Don't Panic."

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If you can get yourself someplace that has a clear view of sunset this evening, take the opportunity: You're likely to see the brightest comet in a generation as it's reaching its peak.

Yes, Comet McNaught is now brighter than Hale-Bopp, Kohoutek or Hyakutake - earlier comets that sparked high hopes but didn't quite meet their high expectations. In fact, according to the ICQ Comet Information Website, McNaught is almost as bright as Jupiter in the night sky. It's been 31 years since a comet was that bright.

Robin Loznak / Great Falls Tribune

Comet McNaught shines Tuesday evening above the Rockies, west of Great Falls, Mont.

McNaught is due to round the sun on Friday, and could well brighten even more as it comes around the other side. When that happens, observers in the southern hemisphere could be treated to a comet so bright it'll be visible during daylight. But for northern observers, the next day or so could be as good as it gets.

"For observers in the northern Hemisphere, tonight is probably the best time to see it: Go outside this evening and face the sunset." SpaceWeather.com advises. "A clear view of the western horizon is essential, because the comet hangs very low. As the twilight fades to black, it should become visible to the naked eye. Observers say it's a fantastic sight through binoculars."

Don't confuse the comet with Venus, the only other object in post-sunset skies that's brighter. The planet is higher in the sky at sunset, while McNaught is the one with the faint tail.

If you need a map, you can check out the sky guide from Space.com, or SpaceWeather.com, or Sky & Telescope. The comet has also been visible in eastern skies just before sunrise, but it's been much harder to spot. Here's the chart from Space.com.

Even if you're socked in with clouds, you can watch the comet reach its climax online, courtesy of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. You can also enjoy galleries of comet images at SpaceWeather.com and Sky & Telescope. And to get a little extra information about what you're looking at, check out our "Inside a Comet" interactive. 

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What would you ask Stephen Hawking? Hawking is arguably the most famous physicist in the world today, because of his mental ability as well as his physical disability, so there's precious little that hasn't been asked already. Do black holes destroy everything they consume? Yes … um, better make that no.  Favorite American TV show? "The Simpsons." Historical personage he'd most like to meet? Marilyn Monroe. And so on…

Since Hawking will soon be making a sojourn in these parts, we just might have an opportunity to send a few fresh questions his way. So here's your opportunity to suggest the top question that's on your mind when it comes to the good doctor and his work.

There are no guarantees - but between now and April, when Hawking is due to deliver a lecture in Seattle, we might have a chance to slip him a few questions. Of course we'll have to hit the lofty heights (for example, what sort of evidence would support his top-down theory for the universe's creation?) as well as some pop-culture questions (seen any good time-travel movies lately?). And for this exercise, let's stay away from the unpleasant personal questions - for example, anything about his messy divorce or reports of abuse.

To brush up on your Hawking lore, check out the latest interview from The Telegraph, plus The Guardian's visit in 2005, astrophysicist/author Gregory Benford's visit back in 2002 and my own report on a virtual lecture. Then pose your questions in the comments section below.

If I get a chance to send questions to Hawking, I promise to include at least one of the submitted queries. And if not ... I think your suggestions will make for interesting reading nevertheless.

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Famed quadriplegic physicist Stephen Hawking confirms that he's planning to take a zero-gravity flight this year - a weightless adventure that's likely to unfold aboard a specially outfitted Boeing 727 operated by Zero Gravity Corp. Hawking made the comment in a 65th-birthday interview published today in The Telegraph, a British newspaper. "This year I'm planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009," he said.

So what does Zero Gravity have to say about that plan?

Getty Images file

Stephen Hawking says he's planning a zero- gravity flight this year.

Zero Gravity's chief marketing officer, Noah McMahon, was coy about the arrangements last week, when I asked him about the status of the company's month-old invitation to Hawking. He said there have been extended discussions with the Cambridge theorist, and hinted that there would be more to say this week.

The plan would call for Hawking to board Zero Gravity's "G-Force One" with assistants who could take care of him during the flight. At an altitude of 30,000 feet, the plane would go through a series of roller-coaster parabolic maneuvers to produce about 30 seconds of weightlessness at a time.

Why would Hawking, who has lost the use of his legs and arms and must communicate through a blink-operated computer, go on such a flight? Well, for one thing, it can be a lot of fun - as I found out last fall. For another thing, such a flight would serve as preparation for a future flight aboard Virgin Galactic's suborbital space plane. In recent months, Hawking has said flying in space was his next goal, and Virgin Galactic has been working with him to make that dream a reality.

Hawking's zero-G trip would send a signal that you needn't give up on your weightless dreams just because you use a wheelchair. Over the past few months, Zero Gravity has been working with the Federal Aviation Administration on the procedures for flying people with disabilities.

It's not yet clear exactly when the flight would take place, but the schedule may become clearer this week. Hawking is due to travel to the United States in April for a lecture in Seattle, plus activities elsewhere. I'm guessing that would serve as the soonest opportunity for Hawking to go weightless. Stay tuned... 

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Archaeologists and NASA experts are using satellite images to find jungle-covered ruins that had been hidden almost literally right under their noses. The 21st-century technology, highlighted in the latest installment of PBS' "Nova ScienceNow," led to the discovery of ancient Maya settlements in Guatemala.

But there are still some mysteries left to solve: "We know a lot more about finding the sites than we do about why we're finding the sites," University of New Hampshire archaeologist Bill Saturno told me today.

However it works, the technique has the potential to transform the way archaeology is done, not only in Guatemala, but in Brazil, Bolivia, Cambodia "or anywhere where the forest has traditionally obscured ruins from view," he said.

During the "Nova ScienceNow" segment, Saturno declares that seeing ruins from space "changes the entire way that we approach archaeology in a tropical environment."

The tale had its beginnings in archaeology done the old-fashioned way: by stumbling upon an unexpected find. Back in 2001, Saturno was surveying a potential dig in a remote, uninhabited patch of Guatemalan rain forest, and took refuge from the hot sun in a dark, cavelike chamber. When he turned his flashlight toward the walls, he spotted marvelous murals telling the Maya story of creation.

The paintings at San Bartolo have been called the "Sistine Chapel of the Maya," and the site has also yielded the earliest examples of Mayan writing. It turns out that San Bartolo was a thriving center of Maya culture for centuries - but over the past millennium, many of the signs of habitation have faded into the jungle landscape.

That's where NASA comes into the picture: In 2003, the space agency began providing Saturno's team with satellite imagery, and Saturno bought into the idea that remote sensing from space could reveal ruins that could not be seen at ground level.

The basic concept isn't new, Saturno admitted. "Crop marks have been used in Europe for decades to identify Roman villas, moats, things like that," he told me. "It's a matter of there being slight changes in the soil over those ruins that, in a wheat field, leaves certain marks. Wheat over [the buried ruins of] a wall matures faster than the wheat next to the wall."

In those cases, the differences in the vegetation are clear enough to be seen by the naked eye from the air. "But the tropical forest is a very different environment," Saturno said.

GeoEye / Space Imaging

Maya settlement sites show up as yellowish splotches in this false-color infrared image of Guatemalan rain forest, sent from orbit by the Ikonos satellite.

The color differences are invisible to the naked eye. You have to identify far more subtle changes in the reflectivity of infrared wavelengths, as seen in multispectral satellite imagery. That's just what NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin were able to help Saturno do, using data from the Ikonos satellite. The trees that grew up over buried ruins showed up as yellowish splotches amid the surrounding shades of red and blue.

Saturno recalled how amazed he was the first time he used the imagery as a guide and walked right up onto a Maya temple: "We'd been in the forest every day for five years and walked by it every day, but we had no idea it was there until we saw it from space," he said.

"As far as being able to use remote sensing in this way in a tropical environment, that's completely unexpected."

Saturno said researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what accounts for the different colors in the infrared. The vegetation may be a slightly different color because of differences in the soil's water retention, as was the case with the European ruins. But that's not the only possibility.

"It could also be a micro-environment created by the decay of those ruins," Saturno said. "The chemicals of that may be actually taken up into the leaves themselves - from the decaying lime plaster, the calcium carbonate there."

Right now, it takes a human's trained eyes to identify the signature of buried Maya sites in the satellite imagery - but a computer could conceivably take on the job if the data set can be tweaked just right, Saturno said.

"All of a sudden, for the first time, we're able to look at the big picture, and understand the extent to which the Maya expanded these cities," Saturno says during the PBS program. "If you think about how many sites are out there ... and we can see how many there are from these satellite images ... how many San Bartolos are out there, waiting to be discovered?"

"Nova ScienceNow," hosted by the Hayden Planetarium's Neil deGrasse Tyson, delves into other subjects as well:

• Research into factors that may slow the aging process, including animal studies involving sirtuin genes, caloric restriction and resveratrol, a substance found in red wine.
• The grass-roots effort to build the elements of a space elevator - with a particular focus on last October's Space Elevator Games.
• The work of Princeton molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler, who has discovered ways in which bacteria use chemical pathways to "talk" to each other - even across species lines.

The show is due for its first airing on Tuesday - but if you miss it, don't fret. Beginning Wednesday, all the segments will be available over the Web.

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Is ethanol the answer for what ails our energy economy? Or could the ethanol boom destabilize grain markets, and even governments? In a report issued today, the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute says a rapid rise in the demand for corn - the current crop of choice for ethanol production - could stir up global economic chaos, and soon.

AP

A handful of corn is shown before it is processed at the Tall Corn Ethanol plant in Coon Rapids, Iowa.

"If there are enough urban food riots in the world, it would create a very difficult situation with potentially a lot of instability, and perhaps on a scale that could disrupt global economic progress. ... We're not talking about something five or 10 or 15 years down the road, we're talking about something that might happen in a year or two," Lester Brown, the institute's president and a longtime environmental campaigner, told me today.

The source of Brown's concern is the sharply increasing investment in ethanol production facilities. Some energy industry analysts see fuel-quality grain alcohol - distilled primarily from corn - as one of the best alternatives to foreign oil. Last year, President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative gave a multimillion-dollar boost to ethanol production.

That buzz over ethanol has really taken hold, and everyone agrees that corn prices will rise as a result. In fact, that's happening already. But how high will those prices go?

Almost a year ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that the nation's ethanol distilleries would require 60 million tons of corn from the 2008 harvest. The Earth Policy Institute factored in the additional investment in facilities since then, and came up with a figure of 139 million tons - more than twice as much. That includes:

• The institute's estimate of current annual production levels, 53 million tons used by 116 plants.
• Expansion of existing facilities, which would increase requirements by 8 million tons.
• Production by 79 plants under construction, requiring another 51 million tons.
• Another 27 million tons of corn that would be consumed by distilleries currently in the planning stage and scheduled for completion by September 2008.

The institute's report notes that the increased demand for corn will affect not only prices for that commodity, but for other crops as well. Rapidly rising prices for grain could spark trouble abroad, it says:

"The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue. Soaring food prices could lead to urban food riots in scores of lower-income countries that rely on grain imports, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria and Mexico. The resulting political instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress, directly affecting all countries. It is not only food prices that are at stake, but trends in the Nikkei Index and the Dow Jones 500 as well."

How bad could things really get? Is the report too alarmist? Well, the Agriculture Department's chief economist shares Brown's concerns - up to a point.

During a Senate hearing in September, chief economist Keith Collins told lawmakers that the ethanol boom is indeed exceeding the department's long-term projections. To keep markets stable, America's farmers will have to produce more corn, and other exporters will have to raise their output as well, Collins said.

"The corn sector will be highly vulnerable to market disruptions - ethanol plants and other users will be operating in a much riskier environment than we have today," he said.

But Collins is more confident that the market will be able to sort things out. Today he told The Associated Press that the Earth Policy Institute was making "a valid point," but took issue with its estimate of future demand. "That strikes me as high," he was quoted as saying.

If corn prices rise, the euphoria over ethanol would likely settle down, and some of the distilleries currently being planned may never be built. Congress could also conceivably adjust the current ethanol subsidy to fine-tune the economics.

Whether or not an ethanol apocalypse is looming, Brown said the U.S. government and the industry needed to develop a much more precise picture of the ethanol energy market.

"The reality is that whether it's farmers or ethanol investors, or food processors or feeders, people have been making decisions in financial terms based on a misleading sense of what the corn market is going to look like," he told me.

The report calls for a "moratorium on the licensing of new distilleries, a time-out, while we catch our breath and decide how much corn can be used for ethanol without dramatically raising food prices." That kind of industrial policy may not fly in the current political environment, but several other recommendations from the report provide additional food for thought:

• Putting much more effort into producing ethanol from non-food sources of cellulose, such as switchgrass, wood chips and cornstalks. This is already a major thrust of the Advanced Energy Initiative.
• Raising fuel efficiency standards for automobiles by 20 percent.
• Promoting a shift toward gas-electric hybrid plug-in cars.
• Investing in wind farms to provide the electricity  for next-generation automobiles. "U.S. cars could run primarily on wind energy - and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon," the report said.

What do you think? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff (or the corn from the stalks) in the energy debate? Feel free to add your comments below.

• Discovery.com: How climate change crippled the Tang dynasty
• New Scientist: DNA so dangerous it doesn't exist 
• Christian Science Monitor: In hot pursuit of Egypt's lost mummies
• Popular Science: How science conquered television

After years of working behind closed doors and locked gates, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has finally lifted the curtain that shrouded Blue Origin, his space tourism venture.

Among the goodies now displayed on Blue Origin's Web site are photos and videos from the venture's maiden test flight in November, as seen from the ground as well as a rocket-cam ... pictures from the West Texas launch range and Blue Origin's production facility in a Seattle suburb ... and even the Blue Origin coat of arms, emblazoned with the motto "Gradatim Ferociter" (Step by Step, Courageously).

Blue Origin

Blue Origin's Goddard rocket ship sits on its pad just before a November test launch. Click on the image to watch a Blue Origin video, used with permission.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, with the aim of developing a new type of vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket ship capable of taking passengers to the edge of space. At altitudes in excess of 62 miles (100 kilometers), customers should be able to scan Earth's curving expanse beneath a black sky, experience a few minutes of weightlessness and justifiably brag afterward that they've been to outer space. Blue Origin's current development schedule calls for commercial trips to start in 2010.

Details about the operation have been hard to come by. That bit about 2010, for example, comes from the environmental assessment that was required in order for the Federal Aviation Administration to approve test flights at the Blue Origin launch facility, built on Bezos' sprawling ranch near Van Horn, Texas. Even the illustration on the cover of the draft report was adapted from the design for the Delta Clipper, an earlier-generation rocket ship.

Blue Origin's freshly updated Web site gives the public its first look at Goddard, the rocket prototype that's being used for the initial round of test flights. The cute, conical craft - named after rocket pioneer Robert Goddard - can be seen rising from a circular pad of concrete to a height of about 285 feet (87 meters), then coming back down to a soft landing.

Nine thrusters are on the craft's underbelly. In its literature, Blue Origin says it's developing a peroxide/kerosene propulsion system, but upon reflection, the propellant here appears to be hydrogen peroxide.

Accompanying all the snazzy graphics is a letter from Bezos himself, in which he explains Blue Origin's lofty goal:

"We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it methodically. We believe in incremental improvement and in keeping investments at a pace that's sustainable. Slow and steady is the way to achieve results, and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along. Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner."

He also touts Amazon.com's S3 servers (which are housing the data on the Web site) as well as job opportunities at Blue Origin. The photos show the brand-spanking-new digs at Blue Origin's production facility in Kent, Wash. ... cheering employees at the maiden launch in Texas ... and even a grinning Bezos holding a broken champagne cork ("Fortunately, our other valve operations went more smoothly," he joked). 

The employment angle appears to be the motivation behind the increased candor.

"As you noted, the new site does make more information available to potential applicants for positions at Blue Origin," Bruce Hicks, a Houston-based spokesman for the venture, told me in an e-mail.

The glasnost over Goddard still doesn't extend all the way, of course. For example, there's no mention of Blue Origin's second, less spectacular test run in December. In response to my inquiry about that, Hicks said, "I just want to remind you that we said previously we didn't plan to comment one way or another about tests, whether they are scheduled, were scheduled, happened, didn't happen, etc."

This means we'll just have to keep checking the FAA's notices to airmen for word of future tests.

Also, there's no reference to the potential price tag for the commercial flights to come. It may well be that Bezos hasn't yet set a price point (see "patiently and step-by-step," above).

For now, this week's revelations are enough: Based on the video of the first flight, it's clear that Blue Origin could give Armadillo Aerospace a serious run for NASA's money at the next Lunar Lander Challenge in New Mexico - just up the road a piece from Van Horn.

Update for 1:15 a.m. ET Jan. 4: Robin Snelson, who knows the ins and outs of the NASA competition as the creator of the Lunar Lander Challenge Web log, says Blue Origin's craft would be ineligible for the contest. Read her comments below for the details.

Update for 9:50 p.m. ET April 16: After rereading this, I saw that the item wasn't updated to reflect the use of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant for this test rather than a peroxide/kerosene mix - so I've made the fix.

• Scientific American: A robot in every home, by Bill Gates
• Wired: Li'l robot dinosaur comes to life 
• Technology Review: Nanoparticles ready for cancer trials
• UC-Boulder: Software retraces ancient Americans' spirit quest 

More than 3,000 reports of unidentified flying objects were sent to the National UFO Reporting Center over the past year - but not one has generated as much buzz as November's sighting at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Was it a metallic-looking, saucer-shaped object rising through the clouds, or nothing more than a meteorological oddity? It's hard to figure out whether the truth is really out there, but one thing is for sure: Clouds can do some positively alien-looking things.

Peter Davenport, the UFO center's director, says the buzz over the O'Hare sighting is fully justified.

"In my opinion, because I know the quality of the witnesses, and because I know the nature of the documents that were generated, it is one of the most dramatic cases of the year 2006 that this center has handled," Davenport told me today from the center's headquarters in Washington state.

On the other side, NBC News space analyst James Oberg - a longtime UFO skeptic - says the evidence that's come to light so far isn't all that compelling.

"It's just sad that we keep getting these reports which are of zero evidential value," he told me. "It's sad because there's a lot of strange stuff in the air that we do need to know."

Davenport's center put out the first reports on the O'Hare sighting weeks ago, but the report really picked up traction over the past weekend, when The Associated Press picked up a Chicago Tribune story about the case (free registration required).

Here are the basics: Employees at O'Hare reported seeing a dark gray, seemingly spinning disc hovering above Concourse C - at an estimated altitude of hundreds of feet, close to the cloud cover. The disc appeared to fly up at a rapid rate, leaving behind a hole in the clouds.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that it received a sighting report, but agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said no further follow-up was planned.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she told the Tribune. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

Case closed? Not so fast, Davenport said.

"I am certain that the airline and the FAA are now attempting to conceal the true nature of the incident," Davenport said.

So far, about a dozen witnesses - all affiliated with the airport or airlines - have surfaced, according to the Tribune. Davenport said he's not yet aware of any reports from outsiders.

"Trying to find the actual eyewitnesses is very difficult," he said. "My suspicion is that there are a great many more. ... You ask, are there other witnesses? My response is, almost certainly. How do we find them, and how do we get them to come forward?"

One of the airport witnesses did take a photo of the phenomenon, but is reluctant to make it public out of concern for his job, Davenport said. "So far, over almost two months, we've been unable to get that," he said.

I have a feeling that even photographic evidence wouldn't settle the case. There are so many weird atmospheric phenomena out there that even crystal-clear pictures could be interpreted either as UFOs or as cloud patterns. For example, check out this roundup of lenticular clouds (offered with a big tip o' the Log to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog). Even knowing what they are, you'd be hard-pressed not to see them as flying saucers worthy of a Steven Spielberg blockbuster.

The idea that the disk left a hole in the clouds might sound like an atmospheric vortex phenomenon - perhaps like the vortices created when airplanes zoom through clouds. This Web page includes a video of an airplane leaving a dark, indistinct vortex in its wake. Other weird phenomena are reminiscent of smoke rings.

When I suggested that the O'Hare incident might have been a vortex created by an airplane rising through the clouds, Davenport shot me right down.

"You can conjecture all day long on that point if you wish to do so, but it's futile in this case," he said. "First of all, airplanes don't fly over [terminal] gates, they fly over runways. So your surmise, I think, is not appropriate in this case. ... This object was seen by many people to accelerate so fast and go straight up in the clouds that their eyes were unable to follow it."

To be fair, Davenport's center has been taking such cases seriously for 32 years - longer than I've been a professional journalist. So who am I to question the reports, particularly when they seem so authoritative?

The O'Hare incident is being taken more seriously than most sightings because the reports are coming from aviation professionals rather than untrained onlookers. But Oberg argues that the professionals don't always make the best eyewitnesses because they tend to favor flight-related explanations for what they see.

"NTSB investigators say that the worst observers of an aviation accident are aviation personnel," Oberg said. "It's because a pilot will usually want to understand what happened, and in his initial perceptions and later retellings will stress the facts that support his initial interpretation."

Oberg pointed to a couple of case studies in pilot misperception, investigated in detail years ago. And just for good measure, he passed along Web links to a Russian UFO report from 2001 that sounds similar to the O'Hare incident, plus the solution to a UFO mystery that came up just last week in Europe.

Oberg said the European case was particularly instructive, because the specifics about the mysterious glow in the sky helped investigators quickly figure out that it was most likely a cloud trail left behind by a Russian rocket launch. Without such specifics, the O'Hare incident may turn out to be little more than another "missed opportunity," Oberg said.

In any case, the incident is making for an interesting tale, and that has led Cosmic Log correspondents to add more UFO tales to a posting I published back in June. Feel free to offer up your own story right here in the comments section, even if it's decades old. If you've got a recent sighting, you might want to let Davenport know as well - you can find the contact details at his Web site.

Even if you've never seen a UFO, you can weigh in with your opinion on extraterrestrial life by adding a click to our unscientific Live Vote - and gauge your UFO IQ by taking our trivia quiz.

• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Do we have free will? Or not?
• Edge: What are you optimistic about? Why?  
• Dave Barry: Did anything good happen in 2006? (via Daily Grail)
• The New Yorker: How do you operate a shower curtain?