School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2016

A White House salute for the YUAA

For its work on developing an automated optical telescope, the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association was among the organizations to receive recognition at the White House’s annual Astronomy Night. With software written by the student team, the large telescope will be motorized and computer-controlled. For better data collection, it will have the ability to see deep-space objects and track celestial objects as they progress across the sky. It will also be equipped to take long-exposure photographs of deep field objects. The group is also working on a prototype of a miniaturized satellite, known as a CubeSat, which will take high-resolution photographs of Earth. (They hope to get images of New Haven and Yale.) 

A safer sunblock

Researchers at Yale have developed a sunscreen that doesn’t penetrate the skin, eliminating serious health concerns associated with commercial sunscreens. Because most commercial sunblocks can go below the skin’s surface and enter the bloodstream, they pose possible hormonal side effects and could even be promoting the kind of skin cancers they’re designed to prevent. But Mark Saltzman, the Goizueta Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering, led a team of researchers in developing a new sunblock made with bioadhesive nanoparticles that stays on the surface of the skin. “Nanoparticles are large enough to keep from going through the skin’s surface, and our nanoparticles are so adhesive that they don’t even go into hair follicles, which are relatively open,” Saltzman said. (For a Yale Alumni Magazine report, see Findings: "Saving Your Skin.")

Twice the trash

Yale researchers found that we are disposing of twice as much solid waste as previous estimates suggested. According to a study led by Jon Powell, a PhD student in Yale’s Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, 262 million tons of municipal solid waste were generated in the United States in 2012. That’s a 115 percent increase over the US EPA’s estimate of 122 million tons for the same year. The new estimate also surpasses the World Bank’s projections of municipal solid waste generation for 2025. A key difference is that the Yale researchers took a more direct method, based on numbers reported by the operators of more than 1,200 municipal solid waste landfills.