From the Apple Support website, some hair-raising news (nyuk nyuk nyuk): “It’s possible to receive a small and quick electrical (static) shock from your earbuds while listening to iPod or iPhone.” Yikes. Turns out, when the air is very dry or very windy — or if you are excercising with your player in your pocket [...]

Barron’s reports that the future of Microsoft’s Zune media player is in Danger: The company will unveil (at the Consumer Electronics Show January 7) a new device combining the features of the company’s Zune music player and its Danger Sidekick handhelds, combined with…. “some motion enhancement features” using an accelerometer. That would be consistent with [...]

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article that highlights a rare risk of using iPods and other portable electronic devices in bad weather. A 37-year-old man was brought to the emergency department at our hospital. He had been jogging in a thunderstorm, listening to his iPod, when an adjacent tree was struck by lightning. [...]

Listening to iPods at unsafe volumes for as little as 5 minutes a day can cause hearing loss. Researchers Brian Fligor and Cory Portnuff estimate that a typical person could safely listen to an iPod for 4.6 hours at 70 percent of full volume using the supplied earphones without greatly increasing the risk of hearing [...]

A 56-year-old Japanese national allegedly attacked a 20-year-old jockey from Louisville on Tuesday while traveling on American Airlines Flight 918. The attack resulted in both men being detained by the FBI. According to FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela, the older man had a strange disposition throughout the flight. He lay down in the aisle and also [...]

Persian businesswoman Anousheh Ansari,set to be the first female commercial space tourist, is scheduled to lift off on the Russian Soyuz TMA-9 flight Monday, September 18th. She plans to blog and podcast from space at a site hosted by Los Angeles-based X PRIZE Foundation. “I‚Äôm hours away from my flight,” notes Ansari at her Space [...]

Apple is recalling over a million laptop batteries because of risk of overheating, explosions and fire. Recent Mac laptops have had problems with overheating and there have been reports of Mac laptops exploding into flames.The affected batteries were sold worldwide from October 2003 through August 2006 for use with 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4 [...]

Doctors in the UK are warning that using an cell phone, iPod or other portable electronic device in a thunderstorm could lead to lethal lighting shocks.According to a letter in the British Medical Journal, the effects of electrocution are likely to be more severe as the metallic components of phones and portable music players act [...]