Set your Tivo or plan to be home two weeks from tonight when the Discovery Channel debuts its new "Salt" episode in its popular "How Stuff Works" series. The show promises to "delve into the science of salt, the prehistoric, life-sustaining mineral that has 14,000 known uses from seasoning food to so much more." We can hardly wait!

Actually, you DON'T have to wait. Discovery Channel's website has already provided an introduction to its hour-long video, entitled "How Salt Works." Authors Tracy Wilson and Shanna Freeman range widely from the chemical properties of salt, the various production technologies, to salt in history and its myriad uses including the medical controversy over whether it would be advantageous for everyone to reduce dietary salt.

The show will debut Thursday, January 29 at 8 pm EST and be shown again four hours later, midnight that same night. And doubtless repeatedly in the coming weeks.

That's two new "Salt" shows in two months, the other being on The History Channel. Get out that microwave popcorn and have an enjoyable hour.

President-elect Barack Obama likes salt ... on caramel, at least. So reports the NY Times in a December 31 story "How Caramel Developed a Taste For Salt ." Food technologists readily understand how salt makes sweet sweeter by masking bitterness, but the traditional Breton confection of heavily-salted butter caramels has now "made its successful run from rarefied Parisian pastry shops to American big-box stores in a decade -- a relatively short period, according to people who study food trends."

Obama becomes the first US president since Ronald Reagan to profess preference for adding salt to foods. Reagan famously observed that "only a raccoon could eat a (hard-boiled) egg without salt." George H.W. Bush missed the point entirely bad-mouthing broccoli when all he'd have needed to do was add some salt to mask its bitterness. Go figure.

If the Reagan Oval Office offered visitors jelly bellies, perhaps President Obama will be offering salt-sprinkled caramels.

Piracy offshore Somalia has been a major media story for the past couple weeks. What's the salt "angle"? It turns out that a Greek freighter carrying a cargo of salt was among the hijacked vessels, according to a December 4 report in the San Jose, CA Mercury-News .

We often describe bulk salt as "a heavy bulk commodity" and, indeed, that was the undoing of the freighter, the Centauri. The news report explains:

The Centauri sped up and began to swerve, trying to throw off the attackers. The Centauri was moving too slowly, weighed down by its cargo of salt. Within five minutes of the first sighting, two boatloads of pirates armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades had swarmed aboard on makeshift ladders.

The story has a happy ending: ship and crew were released unharmed ten days later.

If you enjoyed the twice-issued, often-replayed History Channel "Modern Marvels" show on "Salt Mines," you'll want to tune in tonight at 8 pm for the one-hour sequel: "Salt " for which Mort Satin and I were both interviewed (No, we haven't screened it yet). With all the "holiday releases" from Hollywood, we hope this means the History Channel considers their newest creation a prime time feature. It will re-air four hours later, at midnight EST and next Saturday, December 6 at 7 pm. A great way to get the holiday spirit.

New Mexico Salt and Minerals, Carlsbad, NM, has joined the Salt Institute. The company operates a solar saltworks in southeastern New Mexico and sports a new owner, Sergio Saenz . With the company's membership, Mr. Saenz becomes a member of the Salt Institute's governing board, the CEO Council. Welcome.

If you're intending to prepare a paper for the Beijing salt symposium next September, breathe a sigh of relief. The deadline for submitting papers has been extended from December 15 until April 30. Check the Symposium website for details.

The "first significant import shipment of bulk salt in more than four years" has hit New Orleans, according to the lead story in the October 20 issue of River Transport News. "Industry observers indicated that over the last three weeks, lower Mississippi imports have accelerated with the arrival of several 40,000-ton shipments. Additional shipments are expected." If sustained, the Port of New Orleans "salt imports could approach or exceed record levels." The previous record was set in 2001 and was nearly matched two years later.

The headline, "Booming Salt Demand Adds More Pressure to Barge Freight," tells the corollary story: upriver salt shipments are straining available barge capacity. "It appears that riverborne salt shipments could reach a new record high this year, exceeding the previous record of 9.7 million tons set in 2004," the RTN story reported. They have averaged 8.5 million tons since 1996, the story added. The additional stress is magnified, the story continued.

Under normal circumstances, the projected increase in riverborne salt shipments would cause barely a ripple in the inland barge market. This year, however, salt shipments are being compressed into a significantly shorter shipping window.

Salt shipments into the upper Midwest got an extremely late start this past spring. The heavy snows and severe weather last winter and spring not only resulted in heavy salt usage; it also resulted in the latest opening of the upper Mississippi River to navigation on record. Shipments were further disrupted in May and June as the upper Mississippi River was periodically closed to navigation due to flooding and high water.

When the reporter called for our explanation for the spike in imports, I noted that they seem to reflect the "supply" response to the "demand" signal sent out a couple months ago by Upper Mississippi state DOTs who sought vastly expanded bid amounts of deicing salt. Surprise. Markets work!

Most issues in the salt industry are invisible to the late-night talk shows and ignored by our cultural arbiters, but the latest flap about the cost and availability of road salt for the coming winter has cut a broad swath. In last night's "The Colbert Report " on the national network Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert, tongue firmly in cheek, called for a return to a salt-based economy as a means of stabilizing the nation's precarious financial condition. "Moving to a salt-based economy is a return to our fiscal roots," he explained.

The price of salt has gotten so high that some cities can't afford enough road salt for the winter and will be forced to de-ice their roads the old fashioned way with global warming. In the last year, salt has gone up from 45 to 79 dollars a ton. A ton of dollars is currently worth two euros. That's why I'm not saying you should invest your money in salt. I'm saying you should convert your money into salt. Moving to a salt-based economy is a return to our fiscal roots. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. It's where we get the word salary which is compensation people get in exchange for doing a job. Ask your parents. Of course, we can't trust our banks anymore, but our salt wealth can be stored in any number of locations.

It would be easy to dismiss the premise of a talk delivered yesterday at the 2008 Joint Meeting of The Geological Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies, in Houston. But the audience seems serious enough.

Entitled "Taking the salt out of sea water" sound shopworn, but there's no doubting the need for additional supplies of fresh water in many areas. The UN estimates that, globally, 1.1 billion people lack access to sustainable, clean drinking water and that 1.6 million children die each year because of that lack of access. University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) geoscientist David Kreamer, noting that 37% of the world's population lives within 100 km of a coastline, proposes that mothballed naval ships, such as the decommissioned US aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, be retrofitted to become mobile desalination plants. He terms it "practical." Sounds like it's anything but that, but at least the idea is being vetted by relevant scientists.

Medical News Today has the October 1 story.

mpiweb.org, the voice of the meeting planning industry, had a clever article in its October issue: it identified the "Ten Meetings that Rocked the World ." They include:

1. Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan in 1274 fostering in an era of global trade.

2. The International Olympic Committee in 1894 reviving the ancient Greek games to encourage competition in sport, not war.

3. John Lennon meets Paul McCartney in 1957, the birth of the Beatles and a new style of music.

4. The Fifth Solvay International Conference in 1927 bringing together such intellectual luminaries as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and launching a new age of quantum mechanics-based technology manipulating subatomic particles (e.g. lasers, transistors, diodes, etc.).

5. Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 which led to the creation of the United Nations.

6. Ray Kroc meets Dick and Mac McDonald in 1954 leading to the birth of "fast food."

7. The Hampton Court Conference in 1604 producing the King James version of the Bible which represented the primary literature for its age.

8. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the beginnng of the women's rights movement in the U.S.

9. The organization meeting of the Black Hand Secret Society in 1911. Ten Serbs created a cell of Serb nationalists who, in 1914, assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and precipitated WWI.

10. The Baghdad Conference in 1960 creating OPEC, the world oil cartel.

Did you pick up on the "salt" meeting? #4, the Solvay Conference. Okay, it's a stretch, I know.

Organizer Ernest Solvay had been sponsoring these conferences since 1911, the first one also being star-studded (Marie Curie, Max Planck and a younger Albert Einstein). Solvay was a Belgian chemist who became a philanthropist later in life. Fifty years before his first "Solvay international conference," in 1861, he had developed the ammonia-soda process for the manufacture of soda ash (anhydrous sodium carbonate) from salt (sodium chloride) brine and limestone (as a source of calcium carbonate). The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process. Solvay Chemicals is still heavily into salt-based chemicals and, within the past decade, sold its salt business to K+S, both Salt Institute members, to make esco, the European Salt Company. At one EuSalt meeting in Brussels, we were able to tour the Solvay House.

Compañía Minera Cordillera SCM (CMC), a new Chilean rock salt mining company and part of the Mahoney holding group (Eastern Minerals Group and Eastern Salt Group) has joined the Salt Institute. The Mahoney companies have been long-standing significant importers of deicing salt for roads along the east coast of the U.S.

CMC owns the "Tenardita" mine) in Salar Grande de Tarapacá, Iquique-Chile, with claimed reserves for more than 180 years and a purity exceeding 99%. The surface mining operation can produce 600 tons/hour with a 3-million ton annual production capacity.

US Salt Corporation has sold its only salt property, the former Akzo Nobel evap plant in Watkins Glen, NY., to a natural gas company seeking US Salt's salt cavern storage capacity for its product. Both seller US Salt and buyer Inergy Propane LLC are based in the Kansas City area. The Kansas City Business Journal reported August 11 that Inergy will invest $191 million in acquiring US Salt and expanding its storage capacity by 5 billion cubic feet. A second stage development would add a further 5 billion cubic feet. The story quotes Intergy CEO John Sherman's news release:

"First, the salt business is characterized by stable cash flows and long-term growth potential; and it meets all of our strict acquisition criteria. This transaction also provides us with a long-term pipeline of high-return storage development projects in the heart of the Northeast natural gas distribution infrastructure."

Welcome to the salt industry, Intergy.

Salt Institute member Salinen Austria has just re-launched its presence on the Internet with clean and attractive new website . Check it out.

Earlier today, former Google engineers launched the Internet's newest, biggest search engine, Cuil . Pronounce it "cool." Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages and claims to deliver the results three times faster than any other search engine. It's worth a look. Cuil claims its search algorithm is based on content quality, not page popularity (we'd like to think they're right).

A search on "salt" produced a near-instantaneous 130 million results. Predictably, and reassuringly, the Salt Institute's website ranked #1. Ditto a search on "sodium chloride."

It's always gratifying to hear someone saying you're doing a good job. It's especially gratifying when they know what they're talking about.

True Value announced its top suppliers last month and named North American Salt, a unit of Compass Minerals as its 2007 Supplier of the Year in the lawn & garden category. Compass Minerals announced the honor today. Congratulations.