You can absolutely make a lipo battery "explode" by overheating it by drawing too much power. But it's the kind of explosion where it spews hot gas and maybe catches on fire. You'll definitely get hurt, but that's about it.

You can do MUCH worse by overcharging it. (note the size of that battery). There will eventually be a fireball if you overcharge it and keep overcharging it when it's already swollen to a balloon. But you generally don't charge stuff while it's in your pocket.

These were actual killing-people-explosions. Lipo batteries don't do that.

errors

Assuming it was totally inadvertent. Totally.

Those people are idiots. You always need to check the credentials and history of people telling you something, and even then - if they're an expert in security they may know nothing about electronics or explosives or how secret agencies operate.

And yes, news can be really unreliable - on purpose or just out of mistakes. Gotta always keep that in mind as well, but it also reeeally depends on the particular media company.

Exactly. I remember early days of smartphones before a lot of the safety precautions we have today were implemented, where we saw tons of videos of batteries spontaneously combusting. They expand, there's a pop, and then a small burst of flame that will ignite anything it touches, like your pants, tables they're sitting on while charging, etc. You can get pretty badly burned if this happens while it's in your pocket.

It's just that the videos that have come out of these pagers shows an actual explosion, as if they had been packed with C4. Enough to instantly kill some people with them on their person and harm adjacent passerbys.

Yeah as in BURN DOWN and not as in EXPLODE WITH FORCE AND SHRAPNEL.

So what other kind of battery would a pager be using that might explode if not lithium? Hydrogen cell?