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.

Re:differences

[MightyYar]

You pretty much nailed why I don't feel bad running noscript/adblock here.

I would think more likely...

[etiam.maior]

...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.

Re:Grain of Salt Required?

[cromar]

LOL :) Let me put it another way: these boards [karatedepot.com] are all harder to break than ribs are, yet someone without much training (beyond how to keep their wrists straight while punching) can usually learn to break a board in 2-3 punches, in my experience. This article [tkdtutor.com] explains a bit about the physics of punching.

This is the second such fatality this year.

[hey!]

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.