I’m sitting in the living room and BLAM! like a shotgun blast. I walk into the kitchen and the clock is laying on the floor, one half of an AA battery lying next to it. On the wall—five feet away!—there’s a splatter of some battery-related gunk. On the counter—several feet in the other direction—there’s some kind of wadded-up, gunky something-or-other.
You may have heard that laptop and cell phone batteries can explode (see here, here, and, for video, here), and this seems to be a concern for rechargeable batteries in general. But plain alkaline AAs? Who knew?
Having now seen what the humble AA can do, I’m going to rethink holding my laptop on my lap and/or keeping my cell phone in my pants pocket.
Procrastiblog 
oh, dude. batteries expode. there was a whole thing about batteries and airline security that got overlooked in favor of the dangers of breast milk.
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/09/22/askthepilot202/
Comment by theunbeatablekid — June 8, 2007 @ 8:13 pm
ok, maybe that’s the wrong link. somewhere else I was reading about regular batteries being a nessessary part of the liquid explosives craze. I’ve had some AAs explode in my car.
Comment by theunbeatablekid — June 12, 2007 @ 1:29 am
Maybe you’re thinking of this? “Terrorists could possibly detonate the homemade liquid explosives without the need for a blasting cap by introducing a simple electric circuit, employing a 9-volt battery or the battery pack from a laptop computer.”
That’s a bit different from what I’m describing (and what, I assume, you experienced): my batteries spontaneously exploded, all by themselves. And that weren’t even particularly warm.
Comment by Chris — June 12, 2007 @ 1:45 am
I had a tv remote battery explode yesterday. I was watching tv with the remote sitting on the arm of my chair when it went off like a gun! Remote was trashed! Shocked my wife and myself.
Comment by Kevin 25704 — August 15, 2010 @ 8:39 am
Same thing happened to me,my remote was kept upside down on sofa when i heard a boom explode,One of the battery has exploded and the remote cover was hanging on the curtain 7 feet above
Comment by umesh — August 28, 2010 @ 5:56 am