Astrophysicist Gets Magnets Stuck up Nose While Trying to Developing Coronavirus Preventative

Dr. Daniel Reardon, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, was admitted into a local hospital after being unable to retrieve the magnets that he had stuck up his nose. He had placed them there in the hope of finding a way of reducing coronavirus infections.

How were nasal magnets supposed to help? The Guardian explains:

The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.
[...]
“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.”

During his experiments, Dr. Reardon a magnet up each nostril. These became stuck. So he decided to use the other two magnets in an attempt to retrieve the nasal magnets. These got stuck, too:

“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.
“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”

Fortunately, hospital staff were able to remove the magnets, although the Guardian article does not explain how. Presumably their method did not involve additional neodymium magnets.

-via Richard Hernandez | Photo: Daniel Reardon


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