Business

LOGAN — Utah State University student teams have built bridges and scaled walls to top honors in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Design Challenge the last two years.

This spring, two teams came out on top by creating a light, portable bridge that, like a web, would allow for safe movement between roof tops or terrain with deep gaps. Last year, two other USU student design teams won the competition by inventing the Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber, which allows the wearer to quickly scale a 90-foot wall.

SALT LAKE CITY — Real-estate developers are breaking ground on downtown Salt Lake City's first new hotels since a Hyatt Place was built in 2009.

The additions are for specialized segments of the hotel industry and won't satisfy the needs of the nearby Salt Place convention hall, which needs a much larger hotel that will require public-private financing to get built, said Scott Beck, president and chief executive of the Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau.

WASHINGTON — Companies that drill for oil and natural gas on federal lands will be required to disclose publicly the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations, the Obama administration said Thursday. The new “fracking” rule replaces a draft proposed last year that was withdrawn amid industry complaints that federal regulation could hinder an ongoing boom in natural gas production.

SALT LAKE CITY — The federal government is seeking the forfeiture of about $219,000 from a Davis County smoke shop owner and his business associate.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A bipartisan group of western lawmakers is pushing legislation in Washington to restore cuts of $110 million in federal mineral royalty payments to 35 states.

Over the course of my career, I’ve hired thousands of employees. I have had the pleasure of mentoring and learning from an amazing group of employees: working mothers. These tenacious women attack their careers with gusto, and then head home to dedicate their time to raising a future generation of successful individuals.

CONVERSE COUNTY, Wyo. — It happens about once a month here, on the barren foothills of one of America’s green-energy boomtowns: A soaring golden eagle slams into a wind farm’s spinning turbine and falls, mangled and lifeless, to the ground.

Killing these iconic birds is not just an irreplaceable loss for a vulnerable species. It’s also a federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines.

But the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that flout the law repeatedly. Instead, the government is shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret.