The sodium-packed table flavoring we all take for granted has far more uses than adding taste to food and (in excess) causing hypertension. You may not have given much mind to a bag of salt outside of adding some punch to a dry chicken, but salt has much more to offer than an afterthought to bad cooking. Lot’s poor wife probably didn’t appreciate it quite so much, but a big bag of salt goes a long way through the house.
1. In the Garden
As it turns out, most ugly garden beasties don’t care much for salt. Get rid of poison ivy by spraying leaves and roots with salty water. You can also keep fleas away from the doghouse by washing it with it. The next time you get a bee sting, rinse it with water and cover it with salt to soothe away the pinch. Use salt and hot water to kill grass and weeds growing in between the concrete on your sidewalk or driveway.
2. In the Kitchen Sure salt, as vinegar, can cover a multitude of cooking sins, but did you know it can also put out a fire? Keep a bag nearby while cooking to serve as an extinguisher to grease fires. Not sure about those expired eggs? Add two teaspoons of salt to some water and crack an egg in the bowl. An edible egg will sink whereas a bad egg floats. When your food boils over, there’s no need to dread cleaning it afterward. Sprinkle some salt on the stovetop and it will be a breeze to wipe down after cooling.
3. As a Preservative One of the most ancient uses of salt was to keep meats edible over a long period of time. It prevents the growth of bacteria, which causes food spoilage. But did you also know you can prevent browned cut potatoes and apples by soaking them in cold salt water? Make sure you buy Kosher salt or pickling salt when you use it as a preservative.
Stand in the middle of Salar de Uyuni , the world’s greatest salt desert, and the first word that springs to mind is nothing. As far as the eye can see, nothing. Not a shrub or tree, not a hill or valley, just an endless expanse of white.
This salt flat in Bolivia, the landlocked heart of South America, is a harsh and eerie landscape, perhaps the closest thing nature has to a void. From the Incas to the present day, humanity has made little impression here.
But that may be about to change. Dig down and you find brine – water saturated with salt – rich in deposits of lithium, the lightest metal.
As the invention of the pneumatic tyre turned rubber into a precious commodity in the 19th century, the world’s tilt towards greener energy is expected to do the same for lithium in the 21st. For years, tiny amounts have been used in laptops, BlackBerrys and other devices, but now its main use is expected to be in batteries for electric cars, which campaigners, manufacturers and governments say will – or should – replace petrol and diesel vehicles.
The hotel was built in 1993 by a salt artisan located near the famous Uyuni salt mine in the southwestern part of the country, the number of tourists looking for places to stay while visiting the nearby mine, which is one of the world’s largest of its kind.
In the dining room of the Hotel de Sal Playa in Bolivia, the salt is always on the table. In fact, at the world’s only hotel made of salt, the salt is the table.
The lodge has 15 bedrooms, a dining room, a living room and a bar.
The hotel walls are made of salt blocks stuck together with a cement-like substance made of salt and water. During rainy seasons, the walls are strengthened with new blocks, while the owners ask the guests to avoid licking the walls to prevent deterioration.
Lac Rose , A salt lake north of Dakar , Senegal. The lake is called Rose Lake because chemical reactions involving sunlight, salt and sulfur make the water look red. No fish live in the water because of the high density of salt but the sea is known to be good for skin due to its sulfuric elements.
The Lac Rose was made famous for the Paris-Dakar rally of which it constitutes the ultimate stage. To a few hundred of meters of the ocean, the lake is bordered of dunes and filaos. According to the hour is color turns pink or mauve.
There was a time when salt was worth its weight in gold – literally. And quite right too. Without salt, life would cease. Your muscles would not function, your ability to think would be impaired, your memory would fail and your heart would stop beating. And yet today salt is the demon of the diet world.
As with so many of our ridiculous diet fads, the finger of blame is pointing in entirely the wrong direction, and much depends on how we define ‘salt’.
There are three basic types of salt most of us can buy – standard table salt, sea salt and rock salt –and within these three categories there are numerous variations in terms of source and chemical make-up.
It may be helpful to think of salt in the same way you think of sugar. Refined sugar contains none of the trace elements (very low levels of both essential and non-essential minerals) and cofactors necessary for health that unrefined sugar does. These trace elements and cofactors are also useful in helping the body metabolise sugar better. Without them sugar is just calories.
Salt is much the same way. Unrefined salts, whether mined from the earth or harvested from the sea, contain a broad spectrum of trace elements, often in the same balance as are found in human blood. These include magnesium and potassium, necessary for health and which help the body metabolise the sodium better. Indeed, potassium and magnesium work synergistically with sodium to regulate water balance and nerve and muscle impulses. The more sodium you eat, the more potassium and magnesium you need to maintain balance. Few of us get enough of these elements in our diets, yet we eat high amounts of sodium in salt… Full article here
For more than a century, production of salt from one of the largest salt deposits in the US has been the lifeblood of this town that even bears the product’s name. In downtown sits the Salt Palace Museum , which is made of pure rock salt. The museum displays information on the history of Grand Saline and salt mining memorabilia and shows a film on mining operations.
Just past Barstow on Interstate 15, Las Vegas-bound travelers can eye a tower resembling a lighthouse rising out of the desert encircled by more than 1,800 mirrors the size of billboards.
The complex is often mistaken for a science fiction movie set, but it is actually a power plant that once used molten salt, water and the sun’s heat to produce electricity.
Now a storied rocket maker in Canoga Park and a renewable energy company in Santa Monica are hoping to take what they learned at the long-closed desert facility to build a much larger plant that could power 100,000 homes — all from a mix of sun, salt and rocket science once believed too futuristic to succeed.
The plant could begin operating by early 2013. It would use an array of 15,000 heliostats, or large tilting mirrors about 25 feet wide, to direct sunlight to a solar collector atop a 600-foot-tall tower — somewhat like a lighthouse in reverse.
The mirrors would heat up molten salt flowing through the receiver to more than 1,000 degrees, hot enough to turn water into powerful steam in a device called a heat exchanger. The steam, like that coming out of a nozzle of a boiling tea kettle, would drive a turbine to create electricity… Full article here
Table top salt and pepper shakers which look like batteries are here to power up your lives. Designed by Antrepo , these cells have power indicators on the sides to indicate the amount of spices left in them. Another eye-catching factor is the fact that these power cell look-alike shakers are recyclable, a feature lacking in most power cells these days, maybe this teaches them a lesson. These table tops definitely give a chic look to the kitchen and spice up the food as well… Full article here
The sodium-packed table flavoring we all take for granted has far more uses than adding taste to food and (in excess) causing hypertension. You may not have given much mind to a bag of salt outside of adding some punch to a dry chicken, but salt has much more to offer than an afterthought to bad cooking. Lot’s poor wife probably didn’t appreciate it quite so much, but a big bag of salt goes a long way through the house. 
Just past Barstow on Interstate 15, Las Vegas-bound travelers can eye a tower resembling a lighthouse rising out of the desert encircled by more than 1,800 mirrors the size of billboards.
