Australian astrophysicist Daniel Reardon ended up at the hospital — and it wasn't for a fever or a cough. In fact, his medical conundrum was quite different: he managed to get four small magnets stuck up his nose, according to The Guradian.
Basically, the 27-year-old physicist was bored at home and tried to come up with a contraption that stops you from touching your face — a big no-no in the age of coronavirus.
"I have some electronic equipment but really no experience or expertise in building circuits or things," he told The Guardian.
This is how Reardon's device would have worked: "I had a part that detects magnetic fields," he explained. "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."
But he got it the wrong way around.
"I accidentally invented a necklace that buzzes continuously unless you move your hand close to your face,” Reardon told The Guardian.
And that's without getting into the magnets that got stuck up his nose.
"After scrapping that idea, I was still a bit bored, playing with the magnets," Reardon lamented. "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."
"My partner took me to the hospital that she works in because she wanted all her colleagues to laugh at me," Reardon told the newspaper. "The doctors thought it was quite funny, making comments like 'This is an injury due to self-isolation and boredom.'"
Reardon is done experimenting for the time being.
"Needless to say I am not going to play with the magnets any more," he told The Guardian.
READ MORE: Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device [The Guardian]
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