Author: Mariah Wheeler

OGDEN, Utah — The Ogden branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Utah organized a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally against racial injustice on Monday. Roughly 25 cars congregated with social distance in the Utah city to say that the problems that resulted in the civil rights movement King died for remain entrenched in American society today. “We just can’t pretend racism doesn’t exist,” said Betty Sawyer, the president of the Ogden NAACP. “It does.” The gathering Monday came about seven months after widespread demonstrations occurred in Utah and nationwide over the police killing…

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…