Everyone knows we're not supposed to touch our faces due to COVID-19. Well, Australian astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Reardon was admitted to the hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose after an experiment went wrong.

Reardon was trying to beat the boredom by building a necklace that would sound an alarm upon facial contact when he made a mistake.

“I had a part that detects magnetic fields. 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 said.

The device he invented didn't function the intended manor, but the exact opposite: It only stopped buzzing the alarm when his hand was touching his face.

“After scrapping that idea, I was still a bit bored, playing with the magnets. It’s the same logic as clipping pegs to your ears – I clipped them to my earlobes and then clipped them to my nostril and things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.”

Reardon stuck two magnets inside his nostrils and two on the outside. When he took the outside magnets off, the inside magnets stuck to each other inside his nose.

After a Google search, he figured the answer to magnets stuck in your nose is using more magnets to pull them out. It started off great, until he lost his grip on the retrieval magnets, getting them stuck inside with the other two magnets.

“Every time I brought the pliers close to my nose, my entire nose would shift towards the pliers and then the pliers would stick to the magnet. It was a little bit painful at this point. My partner took me to the hospital that she works in because she wanted all her colleagues to laugh at me. The doctors thought it was quite funny, making comments like ‘This is an injury due to self-isolation and boredom.’”

Daniel Reardon
Daniel Reardon via Facebook
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“When they got the three out from the left nostril, the last one fell down my throat,” he said. “That could have been a bit of a problem if I swallowed or breathed it in, but I was thankfully able to lean forward and cough it out. Needless to say I am not going to play with the magnets any more.”

Read more at The Guardian

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