14 DAY TRIAL // Salt is used often to melt snow on sidewalks and roads, but it can do harm in large quantities, so Engineers at Spain's Carlos III University (UC3M) have designed a sensor that tells you if you're spreading too much.
The reason road surfaces can suffer from salt is because sodium chloride is kind of bad to the environment in excess.
It doesn't help that salt isn't exactly the best friend of vehicles, or any infrastructure for that matter.
The sensor invented by the UC3M team is an optical one, which detects how much salt you've already poured. It does it in real time even.
The method? Measuring the luminescence of the salt under ultraviolet light. Concentrations of salt lower than even 20 g/m2 can be detected (that's the recommended maximum apparently).