Archive for the ‘Safety’ Category

Do you avoid drinking out of clear plastic water bottles, using antiperspirants with aluminum, or cooking in non-stick pans? Use a water purifier and ionizer everywhere you go, always buy organic, mind your cold-water fish list, and have your tap water checked yearly?

If so, we've found either a new source of anxiety in your life or a handy tool to factor into your next car purchase.

HealthyStuff.org is a relatively new information portal for the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Ecology Center, which uses an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) device to test interior components in vehicles for substances "with known toxicity, persistence, and tendency to...

The stylish and delicate-looking front and rear bumper areas of most new vehicles are, just as they appear, damage-prone and expensive to fix, even from minor parking-lot-speed impacts. However the new 2010 Subaru Legacy fares well; in the latest round of bumper evaluations from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), it gets one of the best ratings yet.

The most impressive area of improvement was in the front full-width test, where the vehicle is run into a steel barrier that simulates another car bumper. In this, the 2010 Subaru Legacy sustained just $847 in damage, versus an estimated $4,049 for the previous 2007 Legacy...

Creeping along from red light to red light on your way from a major sports event or concert, or stopped by every red light on the way home late at night, on empty roads, you've probably wondered why traffic lights in the U.S. aren't a little more adaptable.

The short answer: they're not at all smart, and at least here in the U.S. they're horribly outdated. The typical U.S. traffic signaling system is (sorry, fellow GenXers) 30 to 40 years old. And the result of these inflexible geezers signaling traffic is a lot of needless idling and the lack of easy adaptability in most cases to either sudden events like traffic accidents or even daily...