IEN Radio Eric Sorensen

Just last month, Intel announced plans to spend some $36 billion to expand and modernize operations in Hillsboro, Oregon, partly funded by awards from the Biden Administration's Chips & Science Act.
Just a month later, the Oregon plant is facing some decidedly less positive news.
The Oregonian has reported that Intel is being sued by a contractor who alleges exposure while working at Hillsboro caused him to lose both his sense of taste and smell.
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On Saturday evening, an incident at a southeastern Wisconsin substation caused the grid to go dark for some 16,000 people. According to We Energies, a Wisconsin utility company that provides electricity to more than 1 million customers, the culprit was a raccoon. 
According to a spokesperson, a raccoon touched two pieces of equipment simultaneously, which knocked out the power, and likely made for one really unhappy trash panda. 
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A traditional cast with an outer layer made from plaster or fiberglass is more than sufficient for a human with a broken bone. But for a gorilla, which is about 10 times stronger than a human being and less likely to put up with some discomfort, that type of cast doesn’t stand a chance.
Gladys, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, recently fractured her humerus while fighting with two younger females in her troop. Victoria McGee, Cincinnati Zoo’s Zoological Manager of Primates, said it’s pretty common for gorillas to engage in minor squabbles. She said, “She must have fallen in just the wrong way to break her arm, but the result was a complete, oblique fracture of her distal humerus.”
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Mercedes-Benz yesterday announced a new logistics concept: a demonstrator that combines eSprinter vans with e-cargo bikes to sustainably solve the last-mile riddle. 
The Sustaineer (sustainability pioneer) tech demonstrator promises a look at delivery transport of the future. So, what does that look like? 
The electric van is based on the automaker's eSprinter. Mercedes already has fully electric versions of every commercial and private van, and the company expects them to make up more than half of total sales by 2030. 
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Humanoid robots are still a long way from full-scale rollouts across industrial, commercial and other settings. But if this week’s arrivals tell us anything, it’s that the pace of development may be speeding up.
Boston Dynamics earlier this week made news when it bid a fond farewell to Atlas, the hydraulic robot it’s been tinkering with for nearly a decade. The company even assembled a send-off video full of clips of Atlas falling down. However, Boston Dynamics wasted almost no time in introducing its new all-electric version of Atlas.
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Last October, a 26-year-old employee at Faurecia Emissions Control Systems in Franklin, Ohio, was fatally crushed. According to OSHA, the worker had been on the job for about a year and was placing cardboard under a machine that bends vehicle exhaust pipes at the time of the accident. 
The company is a subsidiary of Faurecia North America which, in 2022, combined with Hella to form Forvia, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers with more than 150,000 workers across more than 40 countries. Faurecia North America operates 29 factories in the U.S.
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