University record breakers - Dedication’s what you need

Remarkable things happen in universities. In terms of educating thousands of students, developing ground-breaking research which changes lives and transforming communities, higher education is the place where the unremarkable becomes extraordinary.

One of the great things universities offer is the opportunity for students to experiment and push boundaries. And many of them decide the best way to do this is by trying to break world records for really strange activities. Some of these were highlighted by the Telegraph and included:

Most people dressed as Smurfs – Swansea University
Most people on trampolines – Loughborough University
Most people tossing pancakes – Sheffield
Most electrical energy generated by indoor rowers in 24 hours – University of Nottingham
Longest game of Twister – UCL

There are plenty more exciting records achieved by universities though, such as:

The world’s largest smoothie – served up at the University of Illinois
The most family members to graduate from the same university – it seems the world record is 40, achieved by members of the Wayne family of Marion, Louisiana (USA) who graduated from Grambling State University from 1956 to 2010.
At University of California, Irvine, 4,000 players gathered to launch 1,000 dodgeballs at each other, during a successful record attempt that culminated ‘Welcome Week’ student activities at the college.
Students from the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast built a record-breaking 28.76 m x 1.87 m x 6.22 m footbridge made entirely of Meccano. This bridge was built by 50 students using 10,000 pieces to create the world’s largest Meccano structure.
The largest performing rock band consisted of 953 people and was achieved by Beijing Contemporary Music Academy in Tianjin – there were 349 singers, 154 guitarists, 151 drummers, 101 bassists, 100 keyboard players and 98 wind instruments.
Everyone loves a human letter and the largest such involved 4,223 participants at the University of Tennessee where students and community members formed an orange letter T on the field of Neyland Stadium.
Scientists at the University of Nottingham wrote the world’s smallest periodic table — on the side of a human hair. The table wa so small that a million of them could be replicated on a typical post-it note. Experts from the University’s Nottingham Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Centre used a sophisticated combination of ion beam writer and electron microscope to carve the symbol of all 118 elements into the strand of hair taken from the head of Professor Martyn Poliakoff, an expert in Green Chemistry.
And perhaps most impressively of all, the most people to wear one pair of underpants is 314 and was achieved by the University of Warwick Jailbreak Society in 2014.