The first annual BioMass conference, attended by biofuels researchers, manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and farmers, is underway here at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Prime on the agenda in the opening session this morning was a question lately blaring from headlines, for instance in a story in today's New York Times: can we grow crops for converting into fuel without catastrophically upsetting the world's food supply?

Today's New York Times has a front-page story about how biofuels are driving up food prices around the world and how they therefore may not be a such a great idea after all. That could be true if the only feedstocks available for producing biofuels were food crops, as the article implies, but that's far from the truth.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, celebrated its golden anniversary last night in typically low-key style with a banquet here at the Washington Hilton.

The 1,600 tuxedoed attendees included nine former DARPA directors, program managers past and present, and scientists and engineers from DARPA's contractors in the private sector and academia.

Today in Los Angeles, a private space company unveiled the latest entrant in the race to send paying passengers into suborbital space.

The Lynx, in development by XCOR Aerospace, is envisioned as a two-seat vehicle that will allow a paying passenger to ride up front with the pilot to experience weightlessness and see the Earth from space.

When Hurricane Katrina roared through the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, devastating New Orleans, it shut down a major NASA facility, bringing the space agency's seemingly endless struggle to resume shuttle flights to a swift halt. The Michoud Assembly Facility, located about 15 miles east of the French Quarter, manufactures and repairs the space shuttle's giant external fuel tank-the same tank whose shedding insulation led to the destruction of Columbia in February 2003 and grounded the shuttle fleet last July.