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Dear EarthTalk: I’ve noticed that bamboo is very trendy right now, apparently—in part—for environmental reasons. Can you enlighten? – Eric M., via e-mail Bamboo has a long history of economic and cultural significance, primarily in East Asia and South East Asia where it has been used for centuries for everything from building material to food to medicine. There are some 1,000 different species of bamboo growing in very diverse climates throughout the world, including the southeastern United States....

Locals call it the “Switzerland of Maine” for its breathtaking mountains and picturesque waters, yet Dedham is just one of a cadre of communities in The Pine Tree State where tap water may not be as safe as it appears. Like the majority of the state, many of Dedham’s denizens rely on private wells for the water they drink, bathe in and perhaps use to make infant milk formula. But the water trickling from the tap—unlike water from its public water sources—goes untested and is not subject to any state or federal guidelines....

BOSTON—Exposure to lead—so toxic—is a problem of the past, right? Wrong. Since the U.S. took lead out of gasoline in 1976 and banned lead paint in 1978, most health scientists, regulators and the public have considered the problem largely solved. But ongoing testing shows that even though the average concentration of lead in the American bloodstream has dropped by a factor of 10 since the late 1970s, the levels are still two orders of magnitude higher than natural human levels, which have been determined by studying skeletal remains of native Americans dating to before the industrial revolution....

There is a multicountry moon rush in progress. NASA is orchestrating the Artemis program of robotic and human lunar exploration, due to launch human explorers in 2024 at the earliest. China is preparing to hurl a sample-return mission to the moon this year, joining a Chinese lander and rover that are now on the lunar far side. Other nations, such as Japan and India, as well as private spaceflight firms, also have future lunar exploration in their crosshairs....

Part particle, part liquid, a newly discovered “quasiparticle” has been dubbed a quantum droplet, or a dropleton. The dropleton is a collection of electrons and “holes” (places where electrons are missing) inside a semiconductor, and it has handy properties for studying quantum mechanics. The new entity is termed a quasiparticle because it is not an elementary particle, like the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Rather, it is a composite....

Meditation can relieve pain, and it does so by activating multiple brain areas, according to an April study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Fadel Zeidan of Wake Forest University and his colleagues scanned people’s brains as they received uncomfortably hot touches to the leg. When subjects practiced a mindful meditation technique that encourages detachment from experience while focusing on breathing, they reported less pain than when they simply paid attention to their breathing....

By Laura Zuckerman(Reuters) - A number of unexplained bald eagle deaths in Utah when hundreds of the government-protected birds have migrated to wintering grounds in the central Rocky Mountains has wildlife officials worried.The officials said on Tuesday at least four bald eagles have died and another is close to death. Wildlife specialists said the deaths began December 1 and point to either an outbreak of disease or exposure to some unknown toxin among the raptors in Utah....

Are organic foods more nutritious than conventionally raised ones? Stanford University scientists cast doubt on that concept last year in a widely publicized report. But the gritty little secret is that whether your apples and spinach are organic or not, nutrient levels can vary dramatically depending on growing conditions, such as soil type and quality, temperature, and days of sun versus rain. As a consumer, you have no independent way of verifying that you have chosen a superior batch....

THE WOODLANDS, Texas—Should the U.S. send humans back to the moon in a 21st-century reboot of the cold war–era Apollo program…or should the nation go full-throttle and for the gusto, sending crews to all the way to Mars, where none have gone before? U.S. scientists and policy makers have grappled ad nauseam with America’s next great otherworldly destination for decades, without making much meaningful progress. Now that it is approaching a half-century since an American—or anyone at all, for that matter—last left low Earth orbit, the debate seems lost in space....

A few years ago California became the first state to pass a law aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions from major industries and threatening penalties for noncompliance. Opponents of California’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) have been working throughout the year to defang the measure before it can take effect in January. The showdown between AB 32’s supporters and its opposition comes to a head this Election Day, when Californians vote on Proposition 23, a ballot measure written to keep the state from implementing AB 32’s provisions until the state unemployment rate stays at 5....

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will be ready for its epic Pluto flyby next week despite a recent glitch, mission team members say. New Horizons went into a precautionary “safe mode” on Saturday (July 4) after experiencing an anomaly, but the problem did not turn out to be serious. New Horizons’ handlers say the probe should be back to normal science operations by Tuesday (July 7), exactly one week before it performs the first-ever flyby of Pluto....

“You don’t understand, doctor,” he said pleadingly. “It’s driving me crazy. When I try to study, that spot blacks out whatever I’m reading or looking at. When I’m using my iPhone, I can hardly focus because the spot is there. I feel like ripping my hair out.” Eric* had consulted three ophthalmologists before he came to see me. This third-year medical student, dressed in jeans and an oxford, button-down blue shirt, looked typical in every way except for his spiky blond hair....

Last week’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks—in which tens of millions of hacked devices were exploited to jam and take down internet computer servers—is an ominous sign for the Internet of Things. A DDoS is a cyber attack in which large numbers of devices are programmed to request access to the same Web site at the same time, creating data traffic bottlenecks that cut off access to the site. In this case the still-unknown attackers used malware known as “Mirai” to hack into devices whose passwords they could guess, because the owners either could not or did not change the devices’ default passwords....

Among the most poignant sights in the heavens are white dwarfs. Although they have a mass comparable to our sun’s, they are among the dimmest of all stars and becoming ever dimmer; they do not follow the usual pattern relating stellar mass to brightness. Astronomers think white dwarfs must not be stars so much as the corpses of stars. Each white dwarf was once much like our sun and shone with the same brilliance....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. One of the most weird and wonderful products of evolution is the penis bone, or baculum. The baculum is an extra-skeletal bone, which means it is not attached to the rest of the skeleton but instead floats daintily at the end of the penis. Depending on the animal, bacula range in size from under a millimetre to nearly a metre long, and in shape, varying from needle-like spines to fork like prongs....

By Tom Polansek U.S. sales of medically important antibiotics approved for use in livestock rose by 23 percent between 2009 and 2014, federal regulators said on Thursday, fueling concerns about risks to humans from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Last year, domestic sales and distribution of such drugs increased by 3 percent, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Public health advocates, along with some lawmakers and scientists, have criticized the long-standing practice of using antibiotics in livestock, arguing that it is fueling the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria....

Last month astronomers announced the first discovery of multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars. Binary star systems, which comprise two stars orbiting around a common point, are very common—about half of sun-size stars are thought to be members of binary star systems. But it was only in 2011 that astronomers reported the first confirmed instance of a binary system with even a single planet. The newly discovered system, named Kepler 47, consists of a star about the size of the sun and a smaller companion, orbited by two planets....

Hoku endured some rough days before he died last spring. Three dogs chased him off one of his resting beaches, and he battled a minor tsunami that left him wedged between a pair of boulders in a lava field far from shore. Observers noticed him looking thin in the few months before fishermen found him dead on a beach near the east Kauai town of Kapaa. In the end, disease took him....

U.S. EPA is weighing a revision of standards aimed at preventing the acidification of marine waters. The effort marks the first time EPA has invoked the Clean Water Act to address ocean acidification, and comes in response to a 2007 petition from the Center for Biological Diversity. The center noted that EPA has failed to update the pH standard since 1976 and has ignored research published since then. Concerns about ocean acidification have risen lately, as research shows a link between it and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels....

These men’s suits were built to last. They were pristine-white and composed of 20-plus layers of cutting-edge materials handcrafted into a 180-pound frame of armor. They protected the wearers from temperatures that fluctuated between −300 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit and from low atmospheric pressure that could boil away someone’s blood. On a July day in 1969, the world watched intently as astronaut Neil Armstrong, wearing one of these garments, stepped off a ladder and onto a dusty, alien terrain, forever changing the landscape both of the moon and of human history....