Laptops have always been a hot item but a 50-year-old scientist didn't realise just how much until he burned his penis.
 
The previously healthy father of two remembered feeling a burning sensation after he had been writing a report at home for about an hour with the computer on his lap. He noticed a redness and irritation the following day but it wasn't until he was examined by a doctor that he realised how much damage had been done.

"The ventral part of his scrotal skin had turned red, and there was a blister with a diameter of about two centimetres (0.8 inches)," Claes-Gorn Ostenson, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, wrote in a letter published in The Lancet medical journal on Friday.

Two days later, the blisters broke and the wounds became infected and then crusted but after about a week the unidentified scientist was "healing quite rapidly."

Laptops have always been a hot item but a 50-year-old scientist didn't realise just how much until he burned his penis. The previously healthy father of two remembered feeling a burning sensation after he had been writing a report at home for about an hour with the computer on his lap. Sony Corporation's VAIO laptop PCG-VX7/BD is unveiled in Tokyo in this file photo from March 11, 2002.