# @science on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DRnzp7ijmLZ
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/37446418-science-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/2bdcfe8bdc.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-11-29T01:30:22.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Science 🧬 (@science) — https://gondola.cc/science

## Caption

Christopher Straus, University of Chicago class of ’88, created the school’s first scavenger hunt in 1987, envisioning a modest diversion, limited to his dorm, whose purpose was to instill a sense of camaraderie. These days, many of the items on that first list seem like easy pickings—a hula hoop (10 points), a training bra (25 points), a painting on velvet (20 points). Then again, Item No. 93 was a nude dean, bound and gagged (500 points). ⁠
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Since then, scavvies have been asked to unboil an egg; induce a potato to break the sound barrier; eat their umbilical cord (one student, having persuaded his mother to express-mail the membranous keepsake she’d saved from his birth, stuck it into a Twinkie and swallowed it); get circumcised (someone did); and bring a lion, a tiger, or a bear to campus. ⁠
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In 1999, for five hundred points, a pair of physics students built a working nuclear breeder reactor in a Burton-Judson dorm room in one day, converting thorium powder collected from the inside of vacuum tubes into weapons-grade uranium, using a device made from scrap aluminum and carbon sheets. A concerned nuclear physicist attested to the machine’s efficacy.⁠
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#universityofchicago #uchicago #scavengerhunt #nuclearreactor #reactor #science

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## Tags

universityofchicago, science, uchicago, scavengerhunt, reactor, nuclearreactor

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