Man's penis freed from metal pipe with industrial grinder

A man who got his penis stuck in a steel pipe had to be cut free by firefighters using a metal grinder, after doctors in casualty could not free his genitals from their metal trap.

------------------------------------

Medics at Southampton General Hospital struggled to get the man's penis out of the stainless steel pipe, because the restricted blood flow had caused it to become erect.

Instead, they resorted called in Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service.

The fire crew turned up with a special equipment unit from St Mary's station in Southampton and seven firefighters to help, in what a spokesman understatedly described as a 'delicate operation'.

The firefighters used the four-and-a-half-inch industrial metal grinder to cut the pipe from around the anaesthetised man's penis.

The penis was left bruised and swollen, but otherwise unharmed by its traumatic day.

The man, thought to be aged around 40, did not explain to hospital staff how exactly the pipe got stuck around his penis, after he presented himself at the hospital's Accident & Emergency department on Tuesday morning. He was said to be 'quite concerned and anxious'.

A Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said: 'It was a very delicate operation that required a very steady hand and the crew was worried about things getting too hot during the cutting.

'It's certainly an unusual call-out, and I'm sure the man won't be getting into that situation again.'

Watch manager Greg Garrett from the Redbridge fire station told the Southampton daily Echo: 'I’ve only come across this type of thing three or four times in my 17 years as a firefighter. It’s not a daily occurrence.'

Chile quake may have tipped Earth's axis

(CNN) -- The massive earthquake that struck Chile on Saturday may have shifted the Earth's axis and created shorter days, scientists at NASA say.

The change is negligible, but permanent: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

A large quake shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet.

When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.

"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation," Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.

Scientists use the analogy of a [figure]skater. When he pulls in his arms, he spins faster.

That's because pulling in his arms changes the distribution of the skater's mass and therefore the speed of his rotation.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used a computer model to determine how the magnitude 8.8 quake that struck Chile on February 27 may have affected the Earth.

See scenes of devastation from the quake

He determined that the quake should have moved the Earth's figure axis about 3 inches (8 centimeters). The figure axis is one around which the Earth's mass is balanced. That shift in axis is what may have shortened days.

Such changes aren't unheard of.

The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2004 that generated a killer tsunami in the Indian Ocean shortened the length of days by 6.8 microseconds.

On the other hand, the length of a day also can increase. For example, if the Three Gorges reservoir in China were filled, it would hold 10 trillion gallons (40 cubic kilometers) of water. The shift of mass would lengthen days by 0.06 microsecond, scientists said.