For those who like to swallow stuff (no pun intended)
Pressure-sensitive coating makes swallowed batteries safer
4 November 2014 Emma Stoye
Scientists have developed a protective coating for button cell batteries that stops curious children that swallow them from being injured.
Round button batteries are often mistaken for sweets or toys, but swallowing them can be very dangerous. When the batteries get wet they generate a current that breaks down water to produce hydroxide ions that can build up and damage tissues, resulting in internal bleeding that can cause death in extreme cases.
‘There are 3000–4000 reported battery ingestions per year in the US, mostly in small children,’ says Jeffrey Karp from Harvard University in the US. In the UK, several recent high profile deaths have prompted doctors to call for a national campaign to highlight the dangers to parents.
Most efforts to improve safety focus on preventing the batteries being swallowed in the first place, by making battery compartments on electronics harder to open. But Karp and his colleagues have developed a different approach – a coating for the battery that only allows it to conduct electricity when under pressure, allowing it to function normally inside a device but preventing it setting up a current and damaging tissues if it is swallowed.
The ‘quantum tunnelling composite coating’ consists of metal microparticles suspended in an electrically insulating silicone material. ‘The particles are too far away [from each other] to conduct a current but when you push on the material, the particles get within 1–5nm and can carry a current,’ explains Karp.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/11/pressure-sensitive-coating-makes-swallowed-batteries-safer
FIREBALL WHISKY RECALLED IN EUROPE FOR CONTAINING TOO MUCH OF A CHEMICAL FOUND IN ANTIFREEZE
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 07:03PM
Listen up bar hoppers and whiskey enthusiasts, this news is very relevant to you.
Fireball Whisky, the popular, spicy spirit commonly consumed by younger bar and club folk, was recalled in Finland, Norway and Sweden this past week after it was found that the liquor contained too much of a chemical found in antifreeze.
According to The Daily Beast, the whiskey's European bottler informed Fireball that they were not in compliance with the European regulations. Fireball prepares two different batches of their whiskey, one for the United States and Canada, and one for European countries. Those two batches contain propylene glycol, a chemical that can be found in antifreeze but is deemed safe by the FDA for use as a sweetener in foods. However, the North America batch has a higher percentage of propylene glycol than the European, and the higher chemical formula was sent to the European market by mistake. Norway, Finland and Sweden are countries who've asked to recall those mistaken batches.
http://abc11.com/food/fireball-whisky-recalled-for-containing-too-much-of-chemical-found-in-antifreeze/371611/
http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ex-Ga/Formula-Chemical.html 
