Brown and White Vol. 134 no. 23

              The Brown and White Vol. 134 No. 23
Friday, May 4, 2018 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
$1 MILLION ON THE LINE
Team Soterra advances to final round of XPRIZE
By EMMA SATIN
Assistant News Editor
By EMILY SEGAL
B&W Staff
Lehigh extended its global reach
last week as members of Soterra, a
team of undergraduate engineers,
traveled to Mumbai, India, and
returned as one of five remaining
teams in the Anu & Naveen Jain
Women’s Safety XPRIZE competi-tion.
First prize is $1 million.
According to the XPRIZE web-site,
the goal of the of the compe-tition
— which is open to all ages,
genders and fields of study — is to
“challenge teams to leverage tech-nology
to empower communities
with a transformative solution that
ensures women’s safety.”
Designs are required to silently
trigger an emergency alert with-in
90 seconds and must cost less
than $40 to manufacture. They are
meant to connect at-risk women
— predominantly in developing
nations — to emergency services as
quickly and discreetly as possible.
Lena McDonnell, ’18, the team
president of Soterra, said that
since most users of the device will
not have smartphone access, team
members decided a dynamic mesh
network was the only way to make
Julia Pietruszka, ’20, knew she
wanted to join the Beekeeping
Club before she arrived at Lehigh.
Her grandfather was a beekeep-er
and served as her source of
inspiration.
Pietruszka signed up at the
club fair at the beginning of her
freshman year and now serves as
its president.
She said each year she looks
forward to re-opening the hives
Danielle Bettermann/B&W Staff
In this November 2016 file photo, the former Beekeeping Club president Sabrina Fineberg, ’19, pulls a frame out of a beehive. The
Beekeeping Club ordered around 10,000 bees to replace three hives that had died.
after a long winter. But when the
club opened its three hives on
Mountaintop when the tempera-ture
reached about 60 degrees
this year, members discovered all
their bees had died.
“It was a massacre,” said club
secretary Jason Taitz, ’20. “It
was just dead bees everywhere.
We went to check on them for the
first time after break…It was so
sad.”
The beehives are located
on a cleared, grassy space on
Mountaintop campus.
Members tend to the bees
during the start of the fall semes-ter
and the second half of spring
semester.
In the winter, honeybees clus-ter
together in their hive to keep
their queen bee warm. The queen
bee is kept in the center of the
cluster while the other bees move
around to create warmth.
The exact cause of the bees’
death is unknown.
Andrew Januszak, a senior
computing consultant at Lehigh
and the adviser of the beekeeping
club, suspected harsh winds and
cold conditions played a large
role.
See BEEKEEPING Page 2
Photo courtesy of Brooke Glassman
From left, Emily Randolph, ’19, Lena McDonnell, ’18, Brooke Glassman, ’19, Philanthropist Anu Jain, Cameron Cipriano, ’21, Michael Wu,
’20, and Matthew Ciolino, ’18, pose for a photo at Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE competition. They are members of team
Soterra, which was the only team composed of undergraduate students. See SOTERRA Page 3
‘It was a massacre’: Beekeeping Club loses hives