Ok.. another child story but this one got to do with physics.. it's a story about a freak accident that happened recently and my research project supervisor's crazy ideas to solve the problem.

Well, my supervisor have 3 kids, 2 of them boys and he went into the lab today to share with Sucre and the rest about his latest achievement as a father... The story goes like this...

His sons were playing with a container which had a 5mm big ball bearing in it that made loads of noise when they shake it. Some how, they managed to get the 5mm ball bearing out of the container and started to play with it using a table tennis racket. And quoting Murphy's law, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. The boy manage to hit the ball bearing, rebounds off the wall and into the ear of his brother.

Being a Physicists, particularly an experimentalist, my supervisor started to devise different experiment using physics concepts to remove the foreign object from his child.

1. Cotton bud with double side tape - stick a double side tape on the end of a cotton bud and insert the cotton bud into the ear to stick the ball out - failed
2. Cotton bud with stickier double side tape - see 1 - failed
3. Pressure via suction method - using a thin straw, insert straw into ear and aimed at the ball bearing. Suck out the air to create a vacuum between the straw's thin opening and the ball bearing to lift it out of the ear - failed, ended up with too much air in ear
4. Impulse momentum method - grab head with 2 hands and shake it out - failed, stopped after 1 try for fear of injuries (note, physicists are expected to repeat their measurements just to make sure that the readings are right)
5. Gravity method - Tilt head horizontally on bed and let gravity pull the ball bearing out of the ear. Give gravity some help by slapping child with a pillow - failed again