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For the past two years, the Knights of Lone Peak High School, a team of lanky, long-armed, mostly white teenagers who look only slightly more imposing than a chess club, have not just been beating opponents, they have been crushing them.

At 23-1, the Knights have been ranked as the best high school team in the country for more than a month by the Web site Max Preps and are working their way through the Utah state playoffs, which end Saturday. While Lone Peak has lost to in-state opponents just three times in the past three years, its success nationally is especially surprising. The Knights have won by an average of nearly 28 points this season, including tournament victories over top teams from Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.

"There was one team we played that was literally laughing when we were warming up," the senior center Eric Mika said with a chuckle. "And we beat them by 50."

Unlike many top high school teams that lure talented players from outside their immediate area, Lone Peak, which has a student body of about 2,300, pulls players from the pruned streets of Alpine and Highland — small communities tucked in the foothills about 30 miles from Salt Lake City .

They were so named by Mormon settlers because the landscape reminded them of the Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands.

The Knights — led by Mika and guards Nick Emery and T. J. Haws — have ascended to the top of the national rankings as relative unknowns in high school circles, a feat made more remarkable by the simple fact that they hail from a region not recognized for basketball prowess.

"We know we're different whenever we walk into a gym," said Coach Quincy Lewis, who has a 206-35 record over the past decade. "But our guys walk in there with a chip on their shoulder. We know we have something to prove because, honestly, the other teams don't have a great deal of respect for us."

Then Lone Peak starts playing. Its style is a fearless, careening brand of basketball, built on 3-pointers, lobs and dunks, seemingly more suited for a playground than the movie "Hoosiers."

"They play like inner-city teams; how blacks consider black teams play," said Tyrone Slaughter, who coaches Whitney Young High School in Chicago, which is ranked seventh in the country. "I don't know any other way to put it.

"So many times we see the predominantly white teams play a conservative style, a precise style of basketball," he said. "When you see this team play, it is completely different."

Last season, Lone Peak beat Whitney Young in a double-overtime game at the Beach Ball Classic tournament in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a performance that helped burnish its reputation.

Emery set the tournament's four-game scoring record with 119 points. Word of the Knights' lopsided victories spread around Chicago. Now, Slaughter said, if a team is blown out, it is said to have been Lone Peaked.

The most apparent reason for the team's success is the triumvirate of Mika, Emery and Haws, players, Lewis says, who "don't come around very often for anybody, I don't care what program you're a part of."

The 6-foot-2 senior Emery, who averages 19 points, and the 6-4 junior Haws, who scores 17 a game, are continuing a family tradition at Lone Peak.

Emery's older brother, Jackson, who graduated from the school in 2005, was named Utah's Mr. Basketball and was a co-captain at Brigham Young with Jimmer Fredette.

Haws's older brother, Tyler, was also a Lone Peak standout and was 10th in the country in scoring with a 20.9 points-a-game average at B.Y.U. entering Tuesday's games. The 6-foot-10 Mika, who averages 16 points, is in his first season at Lone Peak after transferring from a private school, but he has known Haws and Emery since they were fourth graders playing on youth teams together.

"I feel this is really a once-in-a-life team," said Haws, who can make 3-pointers from beyond the N.B.A. range or slash through the lane with moves that have earned him YouTube fame.

Lewis has coached many of his players since grade school at clinics and camps. Every summer, he takes the team to play against Amateur Athletic Union squads around the country.

Most A.A.U. teams, the equivalent of select youth soccer clubs, choose marquee players from around their region. And it is rare for a high school team to compete against what are essentially All-Star rosters.

"We have had very few teams that have competed at that level in term of how they play together, shot selection and chemistry," said Greg Procino, the director of events and awards at the Basketball Hall of Fame, which also hosted a tournament that Lone Peak excelled at in 2011 and another in which the team performed well in January.

There is, of course, something else that sets the Knights apart.

A flip through the team program finds plenty of references to Mormonism, whether it is players noting that the last book they read was the Book of Mormon or affirming their life goals as serving a mission and marrying.

Lone Peak players freely discuss how religion unites them. When the team is on the road and needs to practice, it will call up the local Mormon bishop and ask to use the small gym typically attached to each Mormon church.

"A couple of summers ago, we were in Boston," Mika said. "Someone was like: 'Oh, you guys are all Mormon. How many moms do you have? You guys all brothers?' We just laugh."

Mika, Emery and Haws have committed to play at B.Y.U., 30 minutes away. All have also decided to go on missions. For Emery, an explosive guard and the most highly recruited of the three, that means leaving for Germany in May and probably not playing organized basketball for two years.

"A lot of factors went into it," he said of his decision. "I've grown up in the Gospel. And I've wanted to serve a mission since I was a young kid. I'll have four years when I come home."

Lewis recalled that Bill Self pulled Emery aside after he had starred at a University of Kansas basketball camp, saying, "You're good enough to play here."

But it is difficult to ask coaches whose careers rest on immediate success to commit to a top high school prospect who plans to take two years away from basketball.

"The way people look at this state, they say, 'If we go in there and recruit kids, we know they're probably L.D.S.,' " or Latter-day Saints, " 'kids, and they're going on a mission and that's not how our program is set up,' " Lewis said.

For now, however, Lone Peak is seeking a fifth state championship in seven years — the title game is Saturday — and a chance to brag that it ended the season as the country's top-ranked team.

At a recent road game against Bingham High School, the gym roared with hundreds of fans from across the region who had come to see Lone Peak for themselves.

"Which are the three guys we were watching again?" a woman asked her husband.

An older man wondered aloud if all three were heading to B.Y.U.

By midway through the fourth quarter, the game long in hand, Lewis pulled most of his starters, with Mika, Haws and Emery accounting for 69 of the team's 98 points in a 41-point victory.

The three friends sat on the bench, laughing, leaping up when their backups scored and politely chatting with curious fans wandering down for a closer look.

It may have been an away game, but this was home.

The group landed in Pyongyang on Tuesday, giving a round of interviews to journalists at the airport. "We got invited and we just came over to have some fun," Rodman said. "Hopefully, everything will be O.K. and the kids will have a good time with the games."

The visit to North Korea, a country with a brutal dictatorship, comes at a particularly tense time in U.S.-North Korean diplomacy, with North Korea's recent announcement of a nuclear test aggravating an already strained relationship.

But one warm spot between the countries is apparently basketball, something the Vice magazine founder Shane Smith realized while filming two documentaries in North Korea recently. He visited the country's national museum, the Hall of Trophies, where a Michael Jordan-signed basketball given to the former leader Kim Jong-il in 2000 by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is displayed prominently among national treasures. Kim Jong-il was obsessed with the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s, a fascination he apparently passed along to his son, the current leader.

"It's weird because when you go there, it's all very anti-American," Smith said. "North Korean kids are fed anti-American propaganda from pretty much the day they are born. But it's O.K. to like American basketball."

So Smith hatched a plan to take some of those Bulls players to North Korea for one of the installments of a series Smith will host on HBO, called "Vice," featuring news and footage from around the world, which will make its debut April 5. Smith did not go through the State Department but received permission through his previous contacts and the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations. Smith said he was sure that Kim Jong-un's love of basketball was why the trip was approved.

He quickly found that Jordan was not likely to be a willing ambassador. "But Dennis is up for anything and everything, " Smith said. He then recruited the Globetrotters to round out a team, and they offered up Anthony Blakes, known as Buckets; Alex Weekes, known as Moose; and Will Bullard, known as Bull. Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent who is on the trip, will also join in on the games to fill out the team.

"The Harlem Globetrotters are known worldwide as the Ambassadors of Goodwill, and we are proud to continue our storied heritage of entertaining families and breaking down social barriers worldwide," the Globetrotters' chief executive, Kurt Schneider, said in a statement. "Our aim is to entertain and inspire children everywhere. Every child deserves that opportunity."

According to the Globetrotters, team members have traveled to 122 countries in the team's 87-year history. This one might be the oddest trip of all, given North Korea's isolation.

"It is a bizarre place," Smith said. "And this is a bizarre idea."

It certainly qualified as a spectacle when the group arrived, even though Rodman was dressed rather conservatively — for him — in a sweat jacket and pants and an array of facial piercings. In North Korea, after all, men are not allowed to have so much as facial hair. The Globetrotters were more colorful in their bright red gear, with Weekes's trademark Afro in its full expanse.

The group plans to spend four to five days, visit a children's sports camp and play some games with North Korean players.

They tried to make a good first impression with the North Korean news media upon their arrival. "I've always loved Korea — North, South, doesn't matter," Bullard told reporters. "I've always loved Korea personally. We all do. We love every place that we go. They all accept us for who we are. We're role models. We have great characteristics. It's all family fun."

In a bit of unintentional hilarity, one of the reporters asked Rodman whether this was his first visit to North Korea. "It is my first time," he said. "I think it's most of these guys' first time here."

Rodman quickly took to his Twitter account to talk about the trip, writing: "I'm not a politician. Kim Jung Un & North Korean people are basketball fans. I love everyone. Period. End of story." On a less diplomatic note, he also wrote, "Maybe I'll run into the Gangnam Style dude while I'm here," apparently unaware the pop star Psy is South Korean.

Smith said the group hoped for a meeting with Kim Jon-un but was not sure it would happen. Even without that, Smith said he could not wait to see the footage. He said that the opportunity to mix with North Koreans was rare, that his previous trips were supervised tours with only government-approved interview subjects.

"I look at this as basketball diplomacy, the same way we had Ping-Pong diplomacy with China," Smith said. "Once you get the Globetrotters involved, I mean, how can you not smile when you see the Harlem Globetrotters?"

In a contest that had been unexpectedly cast into the center of the national gun debate, the outcome was welcome news for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and a staunch gun-control advocate, who poured more than $2.2 million into attacking Ms. Kelly's chief opponent, Debbie Halvorson, this month.

Flooding Chicago airwaves, Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC, Independence USA, ran a series of advertisements criticizing Ms. Halvorson for opposing certain gun control measures and endorsing Ms. Kelly as the alternative candidate.

The advertising blitz, a huge amount for a single House race, set up Ms. Halvorson's defeat on Tuesday as a shot across the bow to other gun rights-supporting Democrats, a sign of what could await future candidates who do not align with Mr. Bloomberg's quest to change firearm laws across the country.

Because of the political makeup of the district, Ms. Kelly is now all but certain to win the April 9 general election.

Mr. Bloomberg has been vocal about his plan to spend some of his personal fortune on candidates that share his views on specific policy issues, including firearms.

In Illinois' Second Congressional District, which includes parts of Chicago's South Side and southern suburban counties, Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC financed a wave of mailers and television advertisements that criticized Ms. Halvorson, a former House member, for having gotten an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association in earlier elections and for opposing bans on assault weapons and high capacity magazine clips.

Ms. Halvorson, who supports universal background checks for gun buyers, was forced to defend her positions at campaign stops throughout the district.

"Guns were in the air," said Don Rose, a longtime political consultant in Chicago. "It would have gotten some attention anyway, but once Bloomberg put the money in there, he defined it."

Last week, the Illinois State Rifle Association responded to Mr. Bloomberg's effort by sending out mailers asking its members in the district to vote for Ms. Halvorson on Tuesday. Ms. Halvorson said she did not ask for the endorsement.

She had been considered a front-runner after Mr. Jackson resigned his seat in November, just weeks after winning re-election. He pleaded guilty last week to one count of fraud for spending campaign money on personal expenses and celebrity memorabilia.

Ms. Halvorson, a former one-term congresswoman who is white, challenged Mr. Jackson and lost in a primary election last year. She mustered about 29 percent of the vote to Mr. Jackson's 71 percent in the district, which has an African-American majority.

Less than a year later, a similar showing was thought to be enough to hand Ms. Halvorson a victory. With the possibility that other candidates could divide the support of black voters, African-American community leaders raised concerns about the possibility of losing a seat that has been held by a black congressman for three decades.

But just days after Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC backed Ms. Kelly in a television advertisement, another top candidate, Toi Hutchinson, dropped out of the running on Feb. 17. She encouraged her supporters to shift to Ms. Kelly, making the outcome far more difficult to predict.

A former state representative from the south suburbs of Chicago, Ms. Kelly has also worked as a chief of staff for the Illinois state treasurer and as chief administrative officer for the president of Cook County, which includes Chicago. In 2010, she won a statewide Democratic primary race for Illinois treasurer, but lost in the general election.

With the help of Mr. Bloomberg, her calls for more gun control seemed to gain traction in Chicago at a time when the city has been in the national spotlight for its level of gun violence.

"Robin Kelly couldn't have been clearer about her position on gun safety," said Stefan Friedman, a spokesman for Independence USA. "This sends an enormous message to the N.R.A."

"Set your clock back," Mr. Johnston said of his daily commute home from a job in Pullman, Wash.

The nation's patchwork geography of marriage laws was not much of an issue when just a few outlier states granted the privilege. But now nine states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriage, with three voting to join the list last fall − Maryland, Washington and Maine − and the Supreme Court could decide this summer whether equal marriage protections are a right under the Constitution.

The Obama administration is expected to file a brief on the question this week. On Monday, a group of prominent Republicans got there first, signing a brief to the court arguing that marriage is a constitutionally guaranteed right.

All that has made the borders, and the sharp disparities between states, more important and complex than ever for gay couples, and for interstate tourism as well. The marriage license office in Clark County, Wash., across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., had to beef up hours to serve border couples when Washington's new law took effect. The Episcopal Church said last month that the National Cathedral in Washington would soon begin conducting same-sex marriages. But if newlyweds drive home to the city's suburbs in Virginia, any rights granted under the vaulted limestone arches will completely disappear under Virginia's Constitution.

Mr. Johnston and Mr. Irwin, as both proudly gay and proudly Idahoan, said they had thought about taking a Sunday drive to get married, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Marrying across the border and returning home to a place where none of it had legal meaning, they said, or picking up and moving to Washington to obtain marriage protections, would mark equal measures of surrender and defeat. For them, the battle for rights and recognition is to be waged here at home, in a deeply conservative state where same-sex marriage remains, for now, an unlikely dream.

"How are things going to change if people aren't there to help make them change?" said Mr. Irwin, 25, who grew up mostly just across the border in Pullman.

Mr. Johnston, 27, born and raised in an Idaho timber-cutting town, said he rejected the idea of marrying just to make a statement. "The minute we drive across the border it would become invalid and we'd be back to just being two guys who own a house together," he said in an email.

The message is clear, Mr. Johnston added in an interview, that they are staying put to fight. "We're not going anywhere," he said.

Hardly anyone imagines that Idaho and conservative places like it – voters in 30 states have banned same-sex marriage by statute or constitutional amendment − are likely to be moved anytime soon to a full embrace of gay life. The portrait, or caricature, of the American West in films like "Brokeback Mountain" has not entirely faded.

Even adding protections for gay people to Idaho's Human Rights Act has hit a wall, with advocates unable even to get a bill printed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, let alone a public hearing, after years of trying.

But on the local level, the picture is changing, slowly, and again for gay people it comes down to patchwork geography: it is different depending on where you live.

In just the last two months, two Idaho cities, Ketchum and Boise, the largest municipality in the state, have passed nondiscrimination ordinances protecting gay, lesbian and transgender people in housing and employment. Three more communities, including Moscow − Mr. Johnston and Mr. Irwin's hometown – are debating it. Before last December, only one place, the tiny town of Sandpoint in the state's northern panhandle, had enacted such protections.

Changes beyond Idaho's borders, including a subtle shift in policies in Utah by the Mormon Church, which has huge influence in Idaho, have given gay people added resolve to push, and have provided crucial political cover for their supporters. In late 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said it would support nondiscrimination protections for gays in Salt Lake City, the church's headquarters city. About one-fourth of Idaho's population is Mormon, a higher percentage than any state beyond Utah.

"I believe the support of the Mormon Church is key," said John T. Reuter, the former City Council president in Sandpoint, talking about the first nondiscrimination statute. "That the LDS Church supported it in Salt Lake had a ripple effect in Idaho."

With more gay people, especially younger ones, living openly in their communities, the discussion has become less one about a class of people than one about individuals.

"Who gets the credit here is the lesbian and gay community, who have had the courage to come out," said Randy Hall, the mayor of Ketchum, a resort town near Sun Valley that last month passed a nondiscrimination ordinance.

Other people said the personal and the political were melding. That President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage last year, and that majorities of voters in three states did the same, sparked new discussion about Idaho's path. To many younger people, though, what matters is down the block or in the school cafeteria, not across the border.

"I've listened to this national debate," said Lauren McLean, a member of the Boise City Council and co-sponsor of the city's new nondiscrimination law. "But my kids aren't influenced by a national debate," she added. "They just say, 'discrimination isn't okay.' "

Here in Moscow, Mr. Johnston and Mr. Irwin said they were comfortably open about their lives, and even hold hands in public. Last month Mr. Johnston started a two-hour radio show on a local community station, called "Give My Regards to Broadway," and on a recent Sunday he played his favorites from the Broadway hit "La Cage aux Folles."

"It doesn't get any gayer than that," he said, looking up from the microphone as the showstopping number, "I Am What I Am," about the proud assertion of homosexual identity, wailed from the speakers. Mr. Johnston ended the show with a mash note to Mr. Irwin, whom he called the "love of my life."

But Mr. Johnston's message was severely limited in its reach by KRFP radio's tiny 100-watt signal. However fervently expressed in words and music, the show can barely be heard beyond downtown.

So in a rarity in the rarefied world of the performing arts, the Met said it would reduce ticket prices next season. The average cost of admission will drop by 10 percent, or to $156 from $174, Peter Gelb, the general manager, said in a recent interview.

The lower ticket prices will come in a 2013-14 season that includes the return of the music director James Levine to the pit after a two-year absence; an unusual appearance by a female conductor, Jane Glover; and, surprisingly, the first time Anna Netrebko, the Russian diva, will tackle one of the most famous Russian roles at the Met.

Experiencing those moments will still not be cheap, but the new ticket pricing will ease sticker shock. For example, an orchestra aisle seat that is $360 this season will be $330, and a grand tier box seat will go to $180 from $195. In all, more than 2,000 seats for each performance will cost less, the Met said. One exception will be the $20 seats in the rear of the family circle, which will rise by $5. The Met will continue its rush-ticket and free open-rehearsal programs.

"We think that is going to increase attendance," Mr. Gelb said of the price cuts, noting that more ticket sales would compensate for any lost revenue because of lower prices. "At least it better," he added.

Mr. Gelb said prices this year were "raised dramatically," by about 10 percent. "We did not feel it was as successful as it might have been," he said of the increase.

He also blamed falling attendance on a "cannibalization" of the audience by the Met's high-definition movie theater broadcasts. Attendance this season is projected to be, on average, 81 percent of capacity, compared with 84 percent last season. Ticket revenue is projected to be $4 million less than last season's $94.4 million; canceled performances caused by Hurricane Sandy are responsible for half that shortfall, with the rest attributed to a donor's reduced support for rush tickets.

The Met also released details of next year's program. It includes six productions new to the house, among them Borodin's "Prince Igor," which was last heard at the Met in 1917 and is famous for its Polovtsian Dances; Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," starring Ms. Netrebko as Tatiana, her first Russian role at the house since her debut there in Prokofiev's "War and Peace" in 2002; an English-language "Die Fledermaus," with freshly written lyrics by Jeremy Sams; and Massenet's "Werther," with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role.

Deborah Warner will direct "Onegin" in her Met debut. The cast includes Mariusz Kwiecien and Piotr Beczala, Met regulars. Marina Poplavskaya will take over for Ms. Netrebko later in the run. Valery Gergiev, who used to hold the title of principal guest conductor at the Met, will conduct. He last appeared there in the 2010-11 season. The first performance will be the opening-night gala on Sept. 23.

Dmitri Tcherniakov will also direct his first opera at the Met with "Prince Igor." The production, Mr. Gelb said, would strip away the usual medieval pageantry and send Igor on a "psychological journey."

"Die Fledermaus" will open on New Year's Eve, a return to an opera world tradition. Mr. Sams, who also wrote the text for the Met's Baroque pastiche opera "The Enchanted Island," will direct "Die Fledermaus." His lyrics will follow the story but will be written from scratch; Douglas Carter Beane, a Broadway playwright, has written the dialogue.

"It's an operetta," Mr. Gelb said. "You can take liberties. You wouldn't do it with Wagner."

The Met's abbreviated English-language holiday production of "The Magic Flute" has been entrusted to Ms. Glover, who a Met spokesman said would be only the third woman to conduct a Met opera, and the first since 1998, when Simone Young led Offenbach's "Contes d'Hoffmann." The first female conductor at the Met, Sarah Caldwell, made her debut with Verdi's "Traviata" in 1976.

As previously announced, next season's premieres  will include Nico Muhly's opera "Two Boys," a Met commission about duplicity and identity on the Internet. The opera has been "fleshed out," Mr. Gelb said, since its run at the English National Opera in 2011.

The other new production is the first of Verdi's "Falstaff" since Franco Zeffirelli's oft-revived 1964 version. Directed by Robert Carsen, it will be the first of the three operas led next season by Mr. Levine, who has not conducted at the Met since May 2011 because of health problems. His first foray before an orchestra comes on May 19, when he leads the Met musicians in a concert at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Levine is also conducting revivals of Mozart's "Così Fan Tutte" and Berg's "Wozzeck," with two veteran stars taking on the main roles in "Wozzeck" for the first time: Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson.

Mr. Levine, who announced his comeback in October, has been recuperating from damage to his spinal cord and from back surgery and is beginning to walk again, he said, "laboriously and slowly."

"I'm just always doing better," he said in an interview. "I'm making progress in the therapy all the time. The nerve return in this kind of thing is slow."

Mr. Levine said he expected that the very act of conducting an orchestra would help him get better.

"I came from having no idea when or if I'd be going back to work, and now I'm able to do this," he added. "The time is nearly here."

Curious cooks have begun hacking carbonators, the soda-making machines that are proliferating in American home kitchens. Most buyers are happy to use them for their intended purpose: turning tap water into sparkling water. But off-label, they have been used to make herb-infused sparkling wine, newfangled sangria, heady cocktails and nonalcoholic — but intoxicatingly delicious — sodas.

Recently, in a storefront laboratory in Chinatown, Piper Kristensen, a bartender and occasional lab assistant who works for the avant-garde bar Booker and Dax in the East Village, studied a SodaStream Penguin. It had arrived fitted with a new feature, a device that was preventing him from carbonating the clear tomato juice he had purified in a centrifuge. He probed the carbonator's dispensing valve, figured out that its plastic collar had to be raised, and twisted on a rubber band. In short order, he poured a fizzy cocktail of tomato juice, vodka and sugar into elegant cordial glasses.

He handed one to his boss, Dave Arnold, formerly the director of culinary technology at the International Culinary Center as well as an owner of Booker and Dax. Mr. Arnold sipped. "It tastes like ketchup soda," he said. "Maybe you should go back to the egg cream." Mr. Kristensen is on a quest to produce a carbonated egg cream, but as it turns out, it is difficult to carbonate milk. (Its proteins cause excessive foaming.) But as he showed, it is extremely easy to carbonate many other liquids, to delicious effect.

So far, New York City's few remaining seltzer-delivery men are safe. But the home brew looks poised to take over the market.

Americans bought more than 1.2 million home carbonators, like the SodaStream and the SodaSparkle, in 2012 alone. In April, Samsung is to roll out its first line of refrigerators with built-in sparkling water dispensers. Last week, SodaStream — the Israel-based industry leader, which began sales in the United States in 2009 — reported that annual sales worldwide rose to $436.3 million in 2012, from $289 million in 2011. According to Yonah Lloyd, president of SodaStream International, the company sold about 3.5 million machines last year. Because of its nimble approach to manufacturing, SodaStream landed on Fast Company magazine's "World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" list for 2013, alongside Apple and Google. (The company has also attracted unwanted attention, including a boycott, because some of its plants are in the West Bank.)

Home carbonators have been on the market before, but the machines were bulky, and maintaining a supply of food-grade carbon dioxide was complicated. (The new lines offer trade-ins at retailers, or online ordering for fresh CO₂ chargers.) And now, with many consumers worried about discarded plastic bottles, the machines have a strong new selling point. Homemade seltzer is space-saving, inexpensive and environmentally friendly; one plastic bottle can last a year or more. The gorilla-size carbon footprint generated by shipping bottles of sparkling water from, say, San Pellegrino Terme in northern Italy to San Jose in Northern California is eliminated.

Manufacturers like SodaStream and SodaSparkle also have a profitable sideline in flavored and sweetened syrups, mostly artificial, to be mixed with bubbly water into approximations of name-brand sodas.

But the health costs of drinking soda are becoming hard to ignore. And premium beverages with extra fruit juice, like Mash or Spindrift, can cost up to $4 a bottle. "Real ingredients come at a price," said Bruce Cost, the creator of Fresh Ginger, Ginger Ale, an unfiltered brew of grated ginger root, cane sugar and water. (Popular ginger ales like the ones made by Schweppes and Canada Dry contain no fresh ginger.) All this explains why so many people are taking their soda machines off-road. With a little practice, it's possible to make inexpensive, relatively healthy, brightly flavored sodas in a sweet spectrum of fruit, using ingredients, like fresh lemon, that are rarely used in bottled drinks. (Its acidity is too short-lived.)

The first line of experimentation for home cooks is dabbling in syrups to mix with the sparkling water. The variety of all-natural, small-batch flavors on the market, like Morris Kitchen's Preserved Lemon and P & H's grapefruit, is astounding, and makes lovely soda.

Yet it seems the spirit of innovation cannot be held back. Owners of carbonators start to look at juice containers and bar shelves with a speculative eye, making the leap from adding syrup after the fact to carbonating other mixtures entirely.

"At first I was just putting in half apple juice and half water," said Sara Williams, a mother of three in Boulder, Colo., who owns two SodaStream machines: one for water and one for everything else. "Then I started throwing in cherry juice, and grape, and we went a little nuts."

Some home carbonators are able to handle this, or any kind of liquid. Many others carry manufacturers' warnings against using anything but water, and caution that the warranty is immediately voided if even a squeeze of lemon or a drop of apple juice is allowed to enter the sacred bottle. Depending on their design, the machines can create a tremendous mess if used with alcoholic or sweet drinks; some would-be hackers report traumas like ceilings covered with margarita mix, or a fine mist of red wine sprayed around a 400-square-foot kitchen. But the home machines have built-in release valves and relatively weak pressurizers, so any real damage is usually limited to the machine.

"If you put other things through that system, there's no way it won't eventually gunk up the works," said Mr. Lloyd, of SodaStream.

Carbonation has long been one of the tools in the molecular-minded chef's kit: tasting something that's normally flat, like sorbet, and finding it fizzy upends expectations and provides an extra sensation on the tongue. Professional-grade equipment like the ISI siphon can be strong enough to carbonate fruit, chocolate, sorbet and even sugar, creating tongue-crackling, Pop Rocks-like effects.

Carbonation also carries aromas quickly to the nose and has a flavor of its own, a mild acidity that contributes to the refreshing quality of sparkling drinks. Star bartenders like Craig Schoettler in Chicago and Jeffrey Morgenthaler in Portland, Ore., have experimented with carbonating full-strength cocktails like the Americano and the Corpse Reviver. Without the usual slug of club soda to make them fizz, the drinks are very flavorful, very refreshing and very intoxicating.

But the carbonation process can yield other benefits. "Forget the fizz, forget the buzz; the flavor possibilities are incredible," said Gregory Brainin, director of culinary development for the Jean-Georges restaurant group. Mr. Brainin has been experimenting with a home carbonator for years, using it to instantly extract flavor compounds from herbs, spices, chiles and citrus. Instead of steeping chiles for months in vodka, or soaking oranges in red wine until they are mushy to make sangria, he has found that the pressure of a CO₂ charger can effect a flavor transfer more or less instantly.

"The pressure created in the bottle forces water into the aromatics," he said. "And that pushes their flavors out into the liquid." In 30 seconds, using a $28 hand-held carbonator, he infused white wine with basil and mint leaves, and then fizzed red wine with orange and pineapple, creating an instant sparkling sangria in which the fruit was still crunchy and bright.

Finally, he infused vodka with the fruity heat of a Scotch bonnet chile, and the resulting lemon-chile cocktail tingled with effervescence, sweetness and heat.

H. Alexander Talbot, one-half of the team behind the Ideas in Food blog, noticed that his daughter loved carbonated juice once the family acquired a Perlini machine, and set out to make a fizzy rum punch without the rum. He added brown sugar syrup and charred wood chips to the bottle to add the smoky flavor notes of aged rum, plus passion fruit juice, pineapple juice, cherry juice and water. All-juice mixtures can be too thick and pulpy to carbonate, Mr. Arnold said. Strained juice, mixed with water, often produces the best results.

Mr. Arnold has done extensive research into the gastronomic applications of bubbles (not to be confused with the ubiquitous foams, which are produced with nitrous oxide). He said that for successful and controlled carbonation, it's important to have cold liquid, plenty of kitchen towels and patience.

At first, add a small amount of liquid to the machine at a time. And after charging, wait until the foamy head has subsided, then slowly and gradually remove the bottle, as if opening a shaken-up bottle of soda. "You're taking the liquid from a pressurized to a nonpressurized situation," he said, covering a bottle overflowing with a just-fizzed cocktail of Campari and gin. "It just wants to expand."