Author: Mariah Wheeler

OGDEN, Utah – Closed-loop recycling offers the opportunity to mitigate plastic waste through reversible polymer construction and deconstruction. Although examples of chemical recycling of polymers are known, few have been applied to materials derived from abundant commodity olefinic monomers, which are the building blocks of ubiquitous plastic resins. Here we describe a [2+2] cycloaddition/oligomerization of 1,3-butadiene to yield a previously unrealized telechelic microstructure of (1,n′-divinyl)oligocyclobutane. This material is thermally stable, has stereoregular segments arising from chain-end control, and exhibits high crystallinity even at low molecular weight. Exposure of the oligocyclobutane to vacuum in the presence of the pyridine(diimine) iron precatalyst…

UTAH – Last year, a new law gave the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) responsibility for managing the mule deer population. The goal is to assist in the recovery of declining deer populations and help maintain a healthy balance between predator and prey populations: if biologists found that too many mule deer were being killed by black bears, a predator management plan would go into effect immediately (one of the changes). Black bear management came up during a UDWR wildlife board meeting earlier this month (video below), and a new plan was approved to respond to the impacts of…