This is what happens when the inquiring mind of a scientist is combined with the sheer boredom of working from home. An Australian astrophysicist had to go to a hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose during an attempt to invent a necklace that stops people from touching their faces during the coronavirus pandemic. Daniel Reardon explained to The Guardian: “I thought that if I built a circuit that could detect the magnetic field, and we wore magnets on our wrists, then it could set off an alarm if you brought it too close to your face. A bit of boredom in isolation made me think of that.” Reardon tried clipping the magnets to his earlobe and nostril but admitted “things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.” The two magnets stuck together inside his nose, then he attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them—but they also got stuck. “At this point I ran out of magnets,” he said. Reardon’s partner took him to the hospital that she works in “because she wanted all her colleagues to laugh at me,” he said. The magnets were successfully removed.
