IEN Radio

The GMC Hummer has had an interesting evolution by anyone’s standards. What started as a gas guzzling monster SUV back in the 1990s and early aughts fell victim to the economic crunch and high gas prices of the Great Recession. But a decade or so after killing the model, GMC revealed that it would have new life in the form of an all-electric. That said, a lot has changed since the 2020 announcemen...

In January 2024, the FDA issued a warning about dietary supplements purchased on popular e-commerce websites like Amazon and Etsy that were made with toxic ingredients. Tejocote root, part of the hawthorn family, is a Mexican root supplement marketed for weight loss.  An FDA analysis found that these dietary supplements, labeled as tejocote root or Brazil seed, are adulterated. Instead of tejocote...

Last month, Boeing and its subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences sued Virgin Galactic, accusing Richard Branson’s space venture of skipping on bills and holding onto trade secrets. Now, Virgin has returned fire. The company last week countersued Boeing and Aurora, accusing the struggling aerospace company of “shoddy and incomplete work.” According to Reuters , Virgin Galactic said Boeing is breaching...

The manufacturing industry has received a boost from recent legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act, but industrial facilities still experience hundreds of hours of downtime annually. As the industrial landscape evolves and expands, the need for skilled maintenance workers becomes more paramount. Fluke Reliability, a division of electronic test tool manufacturer Fluke Corporation, provides a...

It’s been a staple in Danville, Illinois, since 1969, but on June 8, the Quaker Oats plant will close its doors. Last week, Quaker informed more than 500 workers in Danville they will be laid off but, perhaps, the writing was on the wall. Back in December, Quaker – a PepsiCo brand – paused production at the facility while it sorted out a product recall. Unfortunately, it wasn’t buttoned up quickly...

Canoo, like many other electric vehicle startups, is struggling to survive. And as is often the case in the early days of a company, expenditures exceed revenue. But one cost in particular stood out in Canoo’s latest earnings report. TechCrunch spotted an item near the bottom of a 10-K the company recently filed with the SEC and it details just how much Canoo is reimbursing CEO Tony Aquila for the...

The Department of Justice announced that two Russian nationals who are Florida residents pleaded guilty to conspiring to acquire and illegally export controlled aviation technology to Russia without a license, violating the Export Control Reform Act. According to the DOJ, Oleg Sergeyevhich Patsulya and Vasilii Sergeyevich Besedin conspired to secure orders for aircraft components and parts from Ru...

The Department of Justice announced that a California man pleaded guilty to a scheme that involved selling more than $3.5 million worth of deceptive fan assemblies to the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). According to the DOJ, the defendant, 63-year-old Steve H.S. Kim, controlled an unnamed company that sold fan assemblies to the DLA. But the fan assemblies were either counte...

Freirich Foods has been in the meat business since 1921, when it was founded by young German sausage maker Julian Freirich on Long Island. The company, now based in Salisbury, North Carolina, makes a lot of meat, from pastrami and roast beef to other specialty items. However, the company is perhaps most known for corned beef. The family-owned business says it controls more than 40% of the New York...

Offshore wind power projects set up shop in the water because it’s often too much of a logistical nightmare to transport their massive turbine blades inland. But that could change in the future if one startup is successful in building the world’s largest plane. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, offshore wind turbines can be as much as one-and-a-half times the height of the Washington Mon...

Tyson Foods is looking to refugees and immigrants to fill some of its factory jobs that handle duties such as placing cuts into trays, inspections for bones and washing meat, Bloomberg reported .  The food processor employs some 100,000 people in these positions, and according to associate director of human resources Garrett Dolan, the company anticipates an annual departure of approximately 40% o...

For this episode, I welcome Daniel Huang, an 18-year-old student in Florida. Huang is the creator of his high school’s 3D printing club that finished runner-up in SME’s 2023 Digital Manufacturing Challenge with their proposal to use 3D printing to create fully customizable pills for medical distribution. Huang has done research at the University of Florida Materials Science Lab, worked at Georgia...

Last week, the EPA recognized the 103 U.S. factories to earn Energy Star certification in 2023. The award recognizes manufacturing plants in the top 25% of energy efficiency in their sector.  According to the EPA, these plants prevented more than 8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions—that's the equivalent to the emissions from electricity used by more than 1.5 million homes.

Robotics company Figure and ChatGPT maker OpenAI are only two weeks into their partnership but the collaboration is already producing some astounding and slightly unsettling results. Figure this week shared an update on Figure 01’s progress and said it can now have full conversations with people after connecting to a large pre-trained multimodal model. The company said its robot can now describe i...

The Department of Justice announced that Ford Motor Company agreed to pay the U.S. government $365 million to resolve allegations of Tariff Act of 1930 violations. According to the DOJ, the American automaker misclassified and understated the value of hundreds of thousands of its Transit Connect cargo vans. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official Troy A. Miller called the settlement one...

When a driver gets a speeding ticket or is involved in an accident, their car insurance rates are expected to increase. However, most drivers would not expect to see their rates increase for every instance of speeding, rapid acceleration or forceful braking. But that is what the New York Times reported is happening to people who drive cars made by General Motors. 

The Chinese EV market is a wild west of innovation. Well, maybe it's more like throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks in their own version of a lagging EV market. According to an article from Fortune , new EVs have some ambitious offerings, and this is in addition to the karaoke systems and built-in refrigerators already available.

At the end of February, chemical company and the maker of Teflon, Chemours, made headlines when the company’s board of directors placed its CEO, CFO and controller and principal accounting officer on administrative leave. As part of the announcement, Chemours added that its audit committee would oversee an internal review of the company’s financial reporting following an anonymous report to the co...

Airbus today unveiled the prototype of its fully electric CityAirbus NextGen, an electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (eVTOL) designed to operate in major cities. With its first flight scheduled for later this year, the two metric-ton class CityAirbus has a wing span of approximately 12 meters and will have about a 50-mile (80 km) range with a cruising speed of about 75 mph (120 km/h).

Tosh Pork is the largest pork producer in Tennessee, and with 38,000 sows in 2022, it was the 25th largest pork producer in the U.S., according to a report from Genesus and Swineweb. Based in Henry, Tennessee, the company uses the H-2A agricultural guest worker program to employ people from foreign countries to work the farm. The company's products are typically sold to JBS USA, Kroger and Co...

EV startup Polestar was recently flirting with bankruptcy. The company, which started as an engineering team modifying Volvos for racing in the late 2000s, was spun out of Volvo in October 2017 as a standalone brand focusing on electric cars. Last November, Polestar was looking at a $1.3 billion shortfall when Geely Holding and Volvo Cars stepped up to fill the gap and keep the company above water...

Toyota Practically Giving Away its Hydrogen Vehicles

On Tuesday, Apple cut bait on the long rumored, but never delivered electric vehicle project after about ten years of development. And Elon “production is hard’ Musk, didn't exactly dance on the grave, at least not just on the project's grave. Instead, he offered the following on X, "The natural state of a car company is dead."

Small mistakes can sometimes have big consequences. That’s the lesson one maintenance team is likely taking away from a recent mishap that caused millions in damages to an F-35, a U.S. military fighter jet that costs about $110 million to manufacture. According to an aircraft accident investigation report released by the U.S. Air Force, a handheld flashlight left in the engine of an F-35 caused ne...

Stellantis – the automaker formerly known as Fiat Chrysler – posted record revenues and profits in 2023. At the time of the reporting, CEO Carlos Tavares said he wanted to “warmly thank” the Stellantis team for “contributing greatly to [the company’s] growth story, even in the strongest of headwinds.” It appears the Board at Stellantis has found a way to also warmly thank Tavares himself and it ta...