But if you can figure out how to make it work, then you get to do incredible things. (Courtesy Leila Sales). (Courtesy Leila Sales), Scavenger Hunt items often feature unusual feats of athletic ability. Get more with UChicago News delivered to your inbox. The University of Chicago, along with many other higher education institutions, holds annual scavenger hunts. Twenty years ago, physics majors Fred Niell, AB’99, and Justin Kasper, AB’99, became campus legends when they built a working breeder nuclear reactor for the 1999 Scav Hunt. “You can’t just have a fan to cool something off, because there’s no air. Sales will be at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park at 3 p.m. Saturday. For Scav, people have gotten married, spent four days handcuffed together, gotten permanent tattoos, eaten their own umbilical cords, taken planes without knowing where they were going or why, dragged elephants on to the university campus, been circumcised, built a working nuclear reactor . First proposed as a NASA mission even before NASA itself was formed, it was scrapped because the technology wasn’t there yet. University announces winners of Quantrell and Graduate Teaching Awards Faculty 09.09.2019. A fourth-year and head judge of the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, Chapin dreamed that this year’s competition was lifeless and boring. Students Build Reactor For Scavenger Hunt 96. “We’re not giving up, we’re going to fix it, and finally someone stands up and says hey—we’ll put it in backwards, and that will fix the issue.”. //--> Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. Hundreds of students and alumni compete to fulfill 300-plus items, all of which can be achieved within a 1,000-mile radius of campus. [CDATA[// >