US Product Safety Commission Warns That Some Fidget Spinners Explode (cnn.com) 97
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Fidget spinners are supposed to be calming and fun, especially for students struggling to focus. But after some dangerous incidents involving the popular gizmos, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued new fidget spinner safety guidance for consumers and businesses. There have been a handful of choking incidents reported with the toys, as well as two instances of battery-operated spinners catching on fire and another incident in which a fidget spinner melted, the agency said. No deaths have been reported. The agency also issued safety guidance on battery-operated fidget spinners. Consumers should always be present when the product is charging, never charge it overnight and always use the cable it came with, the statement said. Users should unplug their spinner immediately once it's fully charged and make sure they have working smoke detectors in their home.
"As the agency investigates some reported incidents associated with this popular product, fidget spinner users or potential buyers should take some precautions," Ann Marie Buerkle, acting chief of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in a statement. "Keep them from small children; the plastic and metal spinners can break and release small pieces that can be a choking hazard; and older children should not put fidget spinners in their mouths." Fidget spinners should be kept away from children under the age of 3, the statement said.
"As the agency investigates some reported incidents associated with this popular product, fidget spinner users or potential buyers should take some precautions," Ann Marie Buerkle, acting chief of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in a statement. "Keep them from small children; the plastic and metal spinners can break and release small pieces that can be a choking hazard; and older children should not put fidget spinners in their mouths." Fidget spinners should be kept away from children under the age of 3, the statement said.
Wait a minute? (Score:5, Funny)
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Or the other, I refer you to some N64 Goldeneye [youtube.com] video where explosions happen. Unfortunately, I could not find any videos to exploding computer monitors or exploding chairs or exploding fish tanks. For those who were born after the days of N64 like BeauHD, basically if you shot at anything even with the Dustshovel or PP7 (PPK), it would explode.
Of course, you can thank me for this video by moderating me insightf
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;)
Unless you're a teenage girl, you already have squandered your monthly allowance of smileys.
Re:Wait a minute? (Score:5, Funny)
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You forgot the most important lesson. There is no spoon.
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Is there anything that doesn't explode?
That's pretty much Michael Bay's mantra [youtube.com].
Good. (Score:2, Funny)
Every fidget spinner that explodes is a benefit to mankind. If we can get Apple Watches and BMWs to start exploding, we might actually survive as a species.
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How about we all keep being crazy until your head explodes? Think about it. Battery powered spinners! Spinning the spinner is too hard we better automate the spinning!
The batteries power LE.Ds, not to actually cause it to spin
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I have never seen anybody using one of these spinners. Just this week, I have now seen them for sale. I was actually thinking this was a 4chan joke or something.
Heck, I thought they were some kind of sex toy, which made all this talk of kids collecting them and explosions quite disturbing.
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Let's take a little poll:
Slashdot users: How bad are BMW drivers?
1) bad
2) really bad
3) terrible human beings that need a smack
4) fucking awful, they should all die in fiery wrecks.
The future (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine being a kid in 1997 and taking a time-machine to the year 2017. What is this brand new invention every kid is obsessed with? Does it hover? Fly? Can you do any tricks with it?
No, but it spiiiiins
Re:The future (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids of the past had their fad toys too.
Clackers, yo-yos, rubber wristbands, rubik's cube, hula hoops, marbles...
Re:The future (Score:5, Insightful)
No comparison. Most of those take hand-eye coordination or brains. The first thing you do with a spinner is also the only thing you do, but I guess that fits in with the modern attention span.
I remember taking the heads out of a broken VCR, and spinning it. Those bearings and all that mass made it spin for a pretty long time. It was fun maybe twice.
Re: The future (Score:4, Insightful)
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Watching the VCR thread the tape around the heads, now that was entertaining.
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Clackers, yo-yos, rubber wristbands, rubik's cube, hula hoops, marbles...
So you're telling me that you were to poor to get a tamagotchi in 1997?!
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All of those items are WAY older than that. The Clackers were pulled off the market in the '70's as they had a tendency to shatter. Yo-yo's date to ancient China. Rubber wristbands....those might be newer,but Rubik's Cube is from the mid '70's, Hula Hoops, late '50's, and marbles date to at least the Roman Empire.
By the time Tamagotchi's appeared, I was in my 30's, and I had played with all of the listed stuff except the rubber wrist bands by the time I graduated in '77.
My favorite Clackers were the on
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'97? All of those items are WAY older than that. The Clackers were pulled off the market in the '70's as they had a tendency to shatter. Yo-yo's date to ancient China. Rubber wristbands....those might be newer,but Rubik's Cube is from the mid '70's, Hula Hoops, late '50's, and marbles date to at least the Roman Empire. By the time Tamagotchi's appeared, I was in my 30's, and I had played with all of the listed stuff except the rubber wrist bands by the time I graduated in '77. My favorite Clackers were the ones coated in a thin layer of gunpowder. They sparked and popped when you used them, and burning them or crushing them with a sledgehammer was a 'blast!' Needless to say, they were not on the market for very long at all.
Well shoot, you must remember cap guns. If you were experiment-oriented, how you could also get them to pop with a hammer... and fold them over to pop two, three, four at a time. The pre-coddling era: remember lawn jarts?
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And peel back the paper to expose the powder and use a nail to pop it directly. And string them together to make a fuse. And... yeah. Good times.
I too, can't understand why anybody would ever get a spinner. At first I thought they were a version of gyroscopic wrist trainers:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F... [amazon.com]
that required a "trick" to keep moving, but ten seconds of examination and experimentation revealed that they are not. And gyroscopic wrist trainers are already pretty boring, but at least there yo
Re:The future (Score:4, Insightful)
As a parent of an up and coming geekling, it annoys me immensely how difficult it is to get a hold of chemistry sets contain, you know, chemicals!
90% of them are reduced to baking soda and vinegar, which you have to supply. They include the safety goggles tho, sheesh.
Min
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I miss the Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kit. I was way to young to understand a lot of things in it, even after reading the manual, so it was mostly following existing instructions and whenever I made my own design it never worked. Now though I know the math and things would make much more sense. The only similar kits I see in stores tend to be very dumbed down and for one project only.
For chemistry set, I got a hand me down from the high school chemistry teacher who gave it to my dad. So the cooler c
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I find the electronics side stuff to be in better shape although that might be more because of the circles my daughter fell into by accident of my profession.
Snap circuits aren't bad as a 100 in 1 replacement, a bit dumbed down but essentially replaces spring terminals and jumper wire with coat-button snaps.
Beyond that, I owe the crew in the hardware hacking village at Defcon a big debt of thanks for teaching a 5 year old how to solder and giving her kits to put together each year she went down there. Asid
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Well shoot, you must remember cap guns. If you were experiment-oriented, how you could also get them to pop with a hammer... and fold them over to pop two, three, four at a time.
Cap guns? Expensive and underwhelming!
Match heads in tin foil was all the rage. Leave the match stick on and you got a rocket or a shell, depending on how hard the tin foil was wrapped. Cut the stick off and you had a grenade. Add a tiny piece of a candle, and you had a smoke bomb. Add some steel wool for additional pyrotechnics.
And if someone managed to purloin some fireplace matches, it was even more awesome...
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Damn kids, get off my lawn!
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As for caps, an entire box smacked with a hammer made quite a boom and fire.
Piece of pipe, some black powder or firecrackers and some tissue made a pretty cool bee-bee shotgun too!
(although sometimes it was closer to a pipe bomb than a shotgun)
Sigh, my grandkids will never know the fun and terror of coming home all bloodied and trying to explain what happened to your mom without admitting you were making ant hill bombs in the woods...
Then she cleaned yo
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I get your point but:
Does it hover?
Yes
Fly?
Yes
Can you do any tricks with it?
Yes
You just described mini-drones, which lots of kids have now.
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Sounds like my pet bee, Eric.
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My journey has been longer, padawan. But you are mistaken: we do have both hover cars and hover boards. They are just expensive and dangerous. What did you expect? Antigravity? Suspension of the laws of physics? Personally I was hoping for antigravity capable of floating a car-sized mass with a tiny trickle of current, reorientable as a gravity-based drive. But somewhere back in the 70's and early 80's I finished my physics degrees and alas, there was no plausible antigravity anywhere to be found. S
Re: The future (Score:2)
A kid from 1997 taking a time machine to 2017 would most likely be more interested in the time machine than they would be in anything in 2017. Sure, there'd be the initial "Oh my god, they're on the Playstation 4 now? We only just got the first one!" reaction but you know those kids would take that time machine and try to tame a dinosaur or get a flying car.
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If you sent me here from 1997 I'd probably be more shocked that Trump is president, that we consider it normal to get cavity searches when we have the audacity to travel by plane, that we simply accept what Windows 10 is doing to your privacy, that we got more webpages but the only thing this accomplished was a worse noise-to-info ratio....
And most of all that /. still has trouble with non-latin characters.
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It's Just a high tech pet rock, but not as useful.
Brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)
older children should not put fidget spinners in their mouths
Older children should know what goes in their mouth.
If not, they really need to be treated as mentally ill and watched 24/7.
Re: Brilliant (Score:3, Funny)
In some emergency room, somewhere, there is a doctor trying to figure out how to get one out of somebody's ass... and wondering how they got it up there.
Re: Brilliant (Score:4, Insightful)
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Doctors stopped wondering about the how and why of stuff up people's assholes a loooong time ago.
Yeah, I think they cover that during either med school or residency.
People put all manner of strange things into their own and each other's anuses.
LK
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"Honey, do you remember where I put my car keys?"
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I asked a friend of mine who happens to be a proctologist whether it's true that they have a box where they collect the items they pull out of people's rectums. His answer?
"A box? We have a locker. And we empty it out twice a year"
Mind you, this is a small hospital he's working at... People. Please. Be sensible when you shove stuff up your rear. Make sure it has a handle, and make sure that handle can't break off.
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Do you think those handles are safe enough?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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Reminds me of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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that's progress (Score:3)
take a simple toy made of three small bearings
add a battery and LEDs.
Bruce Sterling was right about history. exploding fidget spinners is the epitome of Atemporality.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Burn and Off (Score:4, Interesting)
>"US Product Safety Commission Warns That Some Fidget Spinners Explode"
More media sensationalism. No phone/toy/whatever "explodes." But anything with a Lithium battery has the potential to melt, burn, even burn rapidly or violently... but that is not an "EXPLOSION". Of course, saying "a fire" is so less exciting or riveting than using extreme words like "EXPLODED!!!!!"
>"Fidget spinners are supposed to be calming and fun, especially for students struggling to focus."
Here is a better tip- turn off your phone!
>"There have been a handful of choking incidents"
And another tip- don't put toys, pens, currency, rocks, pets, batteries, phones, remotes, or other such things in your mouth. And keep anything that can be put in the mouth or break into pieces away from small children (duh).
Re: Burn and Off (Score:1)
Yes, Lithium batteries can burn very violently, but there's no detonation, shrapnel injuries are highly unlikely, and it's generally a better situation involving petrol and fire
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The Risk of Exploding Lithium Ion Batteries - Techlicious https://www.techlicious.com/bl... [techlicious.com] Aug 7, 2013 - As the video below from computer support company PC Pitstop shows, lithium ion battery fires not only burn extremely hot (up to 1000 degrees fahrenheit), but can explode, sending chunks of burning metal across the room.
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Self destruct (Score:3)
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Be interesting to see where they came from (Score:2)
I could be wrong here, but I'd put money on the fact the hot ones are from China.
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Only REAL Ninja Spinners! (Score:1)
Don't rely on cheap Chinese copies! Only REAL Japanese made Ninja spinners reliably explode!
Jobs: You're holding it wrong (Score:4, Funny)
It's a trainer for a Galaxy Note 7.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
A battery operated fidget spinner? Are you kidding me, is this for real? How lazy do you have to be?
Hmm.. where do I get one?
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That was the first thought that I had. There must actually be people who are just too lazy to spin the damn things themselves. However, without RTFA I would guess the power is for adding lights/sounds so that a user's attention can be engrossed even more in something that really shouldn't be taking any attention.
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I've seen battery operated lollipop spinners so you don't have to turn the lolly in your mouth yourself, ya know?
THAT is the epitome of lazy!
Natural (Score:2)
Selection
What would Steve Jobs... (Score:2)
I didn't know that Samsung... (Score:2)
I prefer ... (Score:2)
Do people not know what "explode" even means? (Score:2)
"two instances of battery-operated spinners catching on fire and another incident in which a fidget spinner melted"
Neither of these things is the same as "exploding." Neither of the linked pages refer to "exploding" in any way. Is BeauHD simply illiterate?
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They probably have seen too many bad movies....
Probably works as intended... (Score:2)
My guess would be that such an explosion probably will cure fidgeting permanently...