There are calls to ban lead bullets at shooting ranges due to the potential health risks.
Lead released when people fire weapons at shooting ranges creates such a health risk that lead bullets should be phased out, according to new research.
Source: Are lead bullets at shooting ranges a health risk? | Safe To Work
Shoppers who register new and old appliances with the relevant manufacturer will greatly reduce the risk of a fire in their home.
Thousands of consumers are missing out on product safety warnings because they are not registering their fridges, freezers, toasters and washing machines. “There are more than 100 million large appliances in use in our homes and we keep them a very long time, but less than half (47%) of consumers registered the last product they bought. Unlike cars, this leaves the vast majority untraceable if a safety action or product recall becomes necessary,”.
Manufacturers need to identify and contact owners swiftly to organise a repair. SFRS is urging consumers to register their new and used appliances by logging onto the Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances (AMDEA) website – www.registermyappliance.org.uk – where they will find registration pages for 62 leading brands. The public should register all their appliances, including the older ones.
Product recall information can be found at http://www.registermyappliance.org.uk/products/recall-list/
Source: Register Your Electrical Appliances To Stay Safe | Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service
Imagine tiny wireless sensors the size of a grain of sand that can be implanted in the human body to monitor nerves, muscles and organs in real time. … engineers from the University of California, Berkeley recently created these batteryless sensors, opening the door to ‘electroceuticals’ — an emerging field in which these devices are used to treat disorders like epilepsy, stimulate the immune system or reduce inflammation by stimulating nerves and muscles.
Source: Infinity in a grain of sand: neural dust sensors monitor the body from inside
There has been a concerning jump in the number of products recalled in Australia in the past year, the ACCC says.
Source: Hoverboard fires, food scares fuel jump in Australia product recalls: ACCC
Ms Rickard said button batteries, which can be lethal to children of swallowed, are a continuing concern across a number of products.
“We’ve been working with industry to get a code in place that’s going to lead to much better containment of button batteries, and major retailers not being able to sell products that don’t have batteries properly screwed in,” she said.
“We most frequently get the recalls around children’s novelty products which flash, things like kids bracelets, flashing rings, drinking cups which are cheaply made so easily break.
“They’re also there in car keys, TV remote controls, kitchen scales, hearing aids, so they’re virtually ubiquitous, so we’re saying to anyone who supplies products that contain button batteries, unless they are securely contained so children can’t access them, they shouldn’t be sold at all.”
| New Electrical Equipment Declared Articles (New Zealand) |
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| Energy Safety has revised the lists of High-risk and Medium-risk Declared Articles under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations. These are published in two Gazette notices dated 17 March 2016. These notices fully supersede the previous notices issued in 2006. The definitions that apply are principally those agreed and documented in AS/NZS 4417.
…. Additions are being made to the list of High-Risk Declared Articles in preparation of the full implementation of the Electrical Equipment Safety System (EESS) scheme. The additions are all Australian Level 3 (the equivalent of New Zealand’s High Risk) declared articles. Energy Safety has undertaken modelling that confirms these products require intensive control in an aligned regime. |
USB-C is good news for consumers and companies alike because it helps standardize the very different kinds of ports and adaptors that tech firms have traditionally used for their products. But low quality and cheap cables have flooded the market, causing more harm than good by frying laptops and phones so that they can’t be used again. Finally, it seems that major distributors like Amazon are waking up to the issue and clamping down …
Luca Mari with assistance from Joanna Goodwin, provides a general introduction to the role of terminology in scientific and technical communication, and particularly to definitions, a critical component of standards documents
Extract from a letter from Apple to its customers about a US court order threat to its iPhone encryption:
Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.
The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.
The Threat to Data Security
Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution. But it ignores both the basics of digital security and the significance of what the government is demanding in this case.In today’s digital world, the “key” to an encrypted system is a piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as the protections around it. Once the information is known, or a way to bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated by anyone with that knowledge.
The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.
The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.
We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are readily available to them.
Source: Customer Letter – Apple
“Australian consumers must be able to rely on the safety of goods supplied to them by retailers. By failing to recall and remove products from its shelves for some time after it became aware that the products were defective, Woolworths misled Australian consumers and placed their safety at risk. The significant penalties imposed in this case reflect the serious nature of Woolworths’ conduct.” Mr Sims said “In the future, companies generally must do more to detect unsafe products and remove them from their shelves. The Court has ordered Woolworths to implement an upgraded, dedicated product safety compliance program, and its quality assurance processes will be monitored by an external auditor”.
A new lithium-ion battery shuts down before overheating and then restarts once it cools down, preventing fires that have plagued electronic devices. The new battery technology, developed by Stanford University Professor Zhenan Bao and her colleagues, could prevent the kind of fires that have prompted recalls and bans on a wide range of battery-powered devices
Source: New Li-ion battery won’t overheat :: Industry News :: ElectronicsOnline
When lithium-ion batteries overheat, they can burn through internal pockets, burst into flames, and even explode. One reason such damage can occur is the formation of dendrites—finger-like deposits of lithium that can grow long enough to pierce the barrier between a lithium-ion battery’s halves and cause it to short out.
Dendrites form when a battery electrode degrades and metal ions deposit onto the electrode’s surface. …
In their latest work, Stanford researchers used chemicals designed to prevent dendrite formation.
Not to be confused with the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel Prizes are intended to “honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” – see the article in the link:
Source: 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes Announced | In Compliance Magazine
Carbon nanotubes are the leading candidate to replace silicon in semiconductor chips after the decades-long run of silicon electronics runs out. And IBM is hoping to usher along that transition with a new breakthrough being announced today. In the October 2 issue of the journal Science, IBM researchers say they have overcome one of the most daunting challenges around carbon nanotube transistors, which are the building blocks of electronic circuits with dimensions that are measured in billionths of a meter. Carbon nanotube chips could greatly improve the capabilities of high-performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analyzed faster, increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of Things, and allowing cloud data centers to deliver services more efficiently and economically, IBM said.
Researchers at MIT and Samsung, and in California and Maryland, have developed a new approach to one of the three basic components of batteries, the electrolyte. The new findings are based on the idea that a solid electrolyte, rather than the liquid used in today’s most common rechargeables, could greatly improve both device lifetime and safety — while providing a significant boost in the amount of power stored in a given space.
Typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery’s two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging — has been responsible for the overheating and fires that, for example, resulted in a temporary grounding of all of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner jets …
““All of the fires you’ve seen, with Boeing, Tesla, and others, they are all electrolyte fires. The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries. [With a solid electrolyte] there’s no safety problem — you could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there’s nothing there to burn.”
Source: Going solid-state could make batteries safer and longer-lasting | MIT News
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