Following the death of her daughter, Trista Hamsmith turned her grief into action to help make button batteries harder for kids to access — but the law that passed didn’t apply to toys. Hamsmith tried to get the Consumer Product Safety Commission to apply the standard to toys, but the effort stalled over the summer. The agency has lost key leadership and staff, and now, two former CPSC commissioners are issuing warnings to consumers:

A man has built a rechargeable battery pack big enough to power his whole home - using the batteries from discarded vapes. Electronics engineer Chris Doel, 26, stripped the lithium batteries from 500 binned vapes to create a single one large enough to run his entire house electrics for eight hours. He wired the 2.5 kWh battery in to his home with an inverter and ran all electrical components entirely off-grid for eight hours, including the microwave, kettle, and all lighting. Chris, who works fo