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
Common table salt - normally a brittle crystalline material - can be pulled into nanowires that will extend by more than twice their own length without breaking, US researchers have found.
Nathan Moore and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were investigating water adsorption onto salt crystals using an interfacial force microscope (IFM) to probe the salt surface when they stumbled upon their discovery.
‘When we poked the salt surface, we saw some unusual force behaviour [between the tip of the microscope probe and the surface]. It seemed crazy at the time, but we thought: "could we be making nanowires?" - of course, seeing is believing, so we put salt in the [transmission electron microscope] and there we saw the nanowires!
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Surprisingly, the salt not only becomes ductile (i.e. able to be pulled into wires), but the wires are also superplastic - they can be extended by more than their own length before breaking. This unusual property is more normally associated with metals and certain ceramics, rather than ionic crystals like salt. The wires can also be compressed back into the crystal, but do tend to bend and buckle.
Sodium chloride is the spice of life. It’s the one common condiment in everyday use across cultures, cuisines and continents. Yet it can be harmful if you have too much. Then again, it’s an essential nutrient, and too little of it can be dangerous too.
Salt’s humble image has undergone a sea change since the days of the Dandi march . Now it comes in an assortment of amped-up “healthier” variants. Iodized or not, low-sodium or normal…the confusion this simple and essential (even this is now being debated) food ingredient seems to churn up is bewildering, to say the least. So what’s the truth? Is salt good or bad for you? The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between.
