Booming bamboo: The next super-material? (BBC)
By Mike Wooldridge
BBC News, Nicaragua
Bamboo is being hailed as a new super material, with uses ranging from textiles to construction. It also has the potential to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas, and provide some of the world's poorest people with cash.
Bamboo's image is undergoing a transformation. Some now call it "the timber of the 21st Century".
Today you can buy a pair of bamboo socks or use it as a fully load-bearing structural beam in your house - and it is said that there are some 1,500 uses for it in between.
There is a rapidly growing recognition of the ways in which bamboo can serve us as consumers and also help to save the planet from the effects of climate change because of its unrivalled capacity to capture carbon.
"From the field and the forest to the factory and the merchant, from the design studio to the laboratory, from the universities to those in political power, people are more and more aware of this potentially renewable resource," says Michael Abadie, who took up the presidency of the World Bamboo Organisation last year.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17568088
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One of our local bike frame builders makes these:
http://www.calfeedesign.com/products/bamboo/
(I don't have one yet, but I do have one of their carbon fiber recumbent bikes)
I took off the baseboards, started on the west wall of one bedroom, and covered the entire floor.
Once I reinstalled the baseboards it looks like the walls were built on top of the floor. I love it.
I was a little bit afraid the floor wouldn't end up parallel to the wall on the opposite side of the house, so I gave myself a few days to mull the problem over in my head, measure, measure, mark, measure, remark... but it turned out well.
The most important thing with laying any floor is to give it room along the edges to float a bit, maybe half the thickness of the baseboard. The floor will buckle if it expands a bit and is forced against a wall.
I put resilient foam in this gap ("Touch 'n foam"
to reduce air infiltration and to prevent ants or other creepy-crawlies from using the space as a freeway.
Commercial installers usually won't take the time to remove and reinstall baseboard. They simply leave the baseboard as it is and cover the necessary gap with quarter-round or similar. I'd only do this in an old house with traditional plaster walls and tall baseboards. If you have a new house with traditional plaster walls and old-fashioned baseboards, you're probably not going to be messing with the floor!
I'm not entirely sold on the ethics or environmental impacts of bamboo, especially since the floor is made in China. It's probable the factories making the resins holding the bamboo together are not clean, the workers are not treated well, and the bamboo is grown in sensitive places. But according to a certain green-wash agency it's not an endangered species ripped out of a forest that ought to be protected.
I took the baseboards off and started my layout from the center of the room so I wouldn't wind up with a thin sliver on one side but other than that I did as you. The flooring I put down come from Taiwan and it is beautiful. I really liked working with it and as time goes by we plan to replace the ceramic tile we have in our living room with bamboo, then the laminate in the dining room and then the oak flooring in our kitchen all to bamboo. We like it that well. It feels so good on the feet and its tougher than, well its tough.
I took an old house that was built in the thirties and stripped out all the drywall on the walls and ceiling, all the top flooring to the subfloor, most all the walls inside and rebuilt it to what we wanted. Its beautiful if I do say so myself. Cathedral ceilings in the kitchen and dining room. All new plumbing all new electric all new siding all new roof and new vinyl windows and I have less than 40 big ones including the price of the place to begin with. I do all the work myself and good enough don't get it with me, its all as perfect as perfect can be done. Its the least I can do for my wife.
sorry 'bout that, I get carried away sometimes. 
