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Exploding Cell Phone Battery Kills
LingNoi writes "A man in Korea was found dead at his workplace Wednesday morning and his mobile phone battery was melted in his shirt pocket. No one knows for sure yet but a doctor who examined the body said, "He sustained an injury that is similar to a burn in the left chest and his ribs and spine were broken" We have heard of other dangerous battery products here on Slashdot." Update: 11/30 17:34 GMT by Z : Turns out the melted battery was the least of his worries; he was actually hit by a truck.
I'd like to know just how big that battery was.
Kim Hoon, a doctor who examined the body, said the death was probably caused by an explosion of the battery. "He sustained an injury that is similar to a burn in the left chest and his ribs and spine were broken," Yonhap news agency quoted Kim as saying.Broken ribs and spine? Ok, this man was found in his workplace (a quarry.) Isn't reasonable to assume something else broke those ribs and spine and whatever did that also damaged the phone and battery?
The cell in my Razr could probably take off a finger or two if it exploded from pressure, but a spine is a rather hard thing to break, let alone ribs, unless this was a very, very small man.
This sounds like something from The Weekly World News, the Sun or News of the World.
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The difference between real media and slashdot:
"Exploding cell phone battery may have killed South Korean man: officials"
vs
"Exploding Cell Phone Battery Kills"
Can anyone spot the difference in the meanings?
This guy's the limit!
So it did nothing more than cause a burn on his chest, but the pressure was high enough to break his ribs and spine? Does anything seem odd about this?
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He had one of those phones you shake to see how much liquid is in them, which indicates battery life. His was empty, so he filled it up with gasoline.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Heck, even post notes that "No one knows for sure yet..."
Are we certain he was not in a closed room with a fan?
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The guy worked in a quarry. He's found with broken ribs and a broken spine. Having suffered broken ribs and a broken spine, myself, I can say that it takes an *enormous* amount of force to do that. If the cellphone had exploded with sufficient force to break vertebrae, there'd be a big hole where his chest was and no sign of the cellphone.
Much, much more likely is that he was struck by something large, that broke his back and ribs, and also crushed the cellphone, rupturing the battery compartment and making the battery melt from short-circuiting itself.
People killed by dynamite blasts don't have broken vertebrae, even when the shock wave has torn their hearts loose from their arteries.
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Laptop batteries, and now cell phone batteries? Just wait until pacemaker batteries start to explode..
You just got troll'd!
It is also possible that he was struck by a piece of heavy equipment, which, in addition to breaking his spine and ribs, also ruptured the cell phone battery. The ruptured battery then shorted out and melted.
I find it very difficult to believe that a cell phone battery could contain sufficient pressure break a person's spine and ribs. Unless, of course, said battery was packed with explosives. (And yes, this has been done before - by the Israelis).
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The answer is, he was hit forcefully on the back with a club made of ice, which shattered. He fell on one of the shattered pieces, piercing the cell phone battery causing it to melt. The ice melted, leaving no evidence of what had happened...
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Police have a sony laptop in custody.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
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In the future: hackers find out that re-programming a phone to radically fluctuate its power consumption in the same pattern that in flashing lights induces seizures in gamers, within five minutes, causes the battery to detonate and eliminate the target.
Five minutes later, government denies it has *ever* heard of such a thing, and it would never do it, even if it knew how.
Five minutes later, the reporter who broke the story dies in a mysterious cell phone explosion.
technical writing / development
For every force, there is an equal and opposite force...
So the exploded battery broke his ribs and spine, but couldn't muster enough force to rip the shirt pocket? Give me a break.
...that if indeed the 'melting/exploding battery' came _first_, then he likely snapped his OWN ribs and spine reacting to it. i've seen such things come from grand mal seizures, and the involuntary muscle spasms that would come from such surprising agony right over one's heart could more than cause such breakages.
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It may not be likely, but it is possible, perhaps he was laying on his desk for a nap... or leaning against a filing cabinet?
not to mention fluid dynamics and pneumatics can do some very interesting thing with the force of a blast. This combined with possible poor nutrition / calcium deficiency could allow the breaks in the spine.
Not to mention, while mythbusters may be interesting they are _NOT_ very scientific, they are a TV show and they miss quite a few possibilities. That said much of what they do test is well researched, yet they can't test all of the possibilities. Plus who is to say that some of the myths that they have "busted" could have been freak accidents, like some of the things on Ripley's believe it or not?
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Which is too bad, because he missed the email warning about exploding cell phones...
"But this one goes to 11!"
"In Korea, exploding cellphones are only for old people."
In the rest of the world, they're also great stocking stuffers for ex-wives, guys who beat on women, and Darl McBride.
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In June a Chinese man named Xiao Jinpeng was killed by an exploding battery in a Motorola phone (http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/07/phone_battery_explosion_kills_weldor_in_gansu_keralanex.php)
At the time, this was the sixth documented cell phone explosion in two years for China.
As I pointed out in another post, an 1100 maH battery packs more than enough energy to kill a man, especially by injury to the heart. In rare cases even a baseball striking the chest can result in cardiac arrest. An exploding cell phone could pack a considerable wallop, maybe not enough to kill you if you had it on your hip, but certainly enough to kill you if you carried it on your chest.
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Yes, you're not quite right. The magnitude of the force depends on the distance over which it is applied. Since the phone is restricted in one direction by your body, and not so much the other direction (by a flimsy shirt) the force on you is much greater.
The momentum of the phone itself is enough. Go down to the range and practice shooting. Feel all that recoil, despite the fact that the bullet is completely unrestrained in the other direction, and a bullet has a lot less mass than the gun does.
Now in a powerful explosion, the phone's gonna shoot off pretty fast. In some cases fast enough to rip through the shirt once it gets far enough that it takes up all the slack. Which brings to mind the question: how strong was that shirt? If it was strong enough, perhaps some kind of reinforced shirt or something, the hoop stress would be supported by the guy's back, so the shirt itself could maybe be the thing that broke the spine, rather than the shockwave. If that's the case, then there is also an easy solution: breakaway pockets.
I'm not sure that an explosion powerful enough to break the spine would also break the shirt, because I don't know how powerful an explosion would do either. Ribs are pretty easy to crack, though. You can do it just by punching someone hard, and you will crack some if you ever have to do CPR.
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Your post is an example of why the U.S. House Says the Internet is [a] Terrorist Threat. :)
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