As East Lasing native Allison Foster sat at a picnic table with her sons Connor, 7, and Cole, 8, a motorcycle cop revved up his engine only feet away. This wasn’t any scene of a crime, it was the 26th annual National Night Out, a safety carnival held on Tuesday at Patriarche Park, 1100 Alton Road.
Bikers might feel safer riding around campus if legislation promoting biker safety is passed in the state Senate. The bills, introduced May 5 by state Sen. Tom George, R-Texas Township, would require driver’s education classes to provide instruction on bicycle law and increase awareness of bicyclists on the road.
Payback is a dish best served cold. Ice cold. “Everybody likes to dunk Chief Wibert,” East Lansing police Sgt. Patricia Nowak said. “He’s a very good sport; he volunteers for this every time. (The) water’s usually pretty cold.”
As passing cars honked their horns frantically, Haslett resident Kal Joshi stood and smiled. Joshi, along with about 30 others, stood on the corner of Abbot Road and Grand River Avenue on Thursday with their signs raised delivering one message. “Health care is a human right,” Joshi said.
Reptiles and insects were all the rage Tuesday at the final 2009 Play in the Park interactive children’s entertainment event at Valley Court Park, 201 Hillside Court. Preuss Pets, a family owned exotic pet store located in Lansing’s Old Town, was the main attraction with an assortment of reptilian creatures, including a Savannah monitor lizard and a 62-year-old South American red-footed tortoise named Fred. Jessica Howe, a community events intern with the city of East Lansing, organized July’s four Play in the Park events and said Tuesday’s Pets in the Park was unique because audience members were able to interact with animals they might usually only be able to see through the glass in a pet store. “We’re just going to talk about how (the animals) survive in the wild,” Howe said.
Supervisors should be more attentive to the work and family needs of employees to maximize worker health and efficiency, according to a recent study co-authored by an MSU professor. Ellen Kossek, an MSU professor of organizational behavior and human resource management, helped create a training program aimed to ease tensions between employees’ work and family demands by instructing supervisors to address those concerns.
MSU researchers are working on reducing poverty and mitigating climate change at the same time. Their project, called Carbon2Markets, works to slow climate change through sequestering carbon via agroforestry and helps provide income to farmers.
Although overall voter participation remained statistically unchanged between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, the people making up the voting population did shift, including an increase in younger voters.
Cheryl Goetz beat more than 100 applicants vying for 18 spots for a summer internship at the Houston-based National Space Biomedical Research Institute, or NSBRI, to study the health risks of long-term space flight on the human body. Goetz, a mathematics and premedical senior, said she has been working since May with the NASA Flight Analogs Project, a program that studies the effects of microgravity and space flight on the human body at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, Texas. “Every day I learn something new,” she said.
Plans to offer low-cost flights out of Lansing this summer never left the ground after Jet America suspended flights and began refunding tickets earlier this month. The carrier, which was supposed to begin service July 13, planned service to Lansing Capital Region International Airport with direct flights to Newark, N.J., as well as to Melbourne, Fla., near Orlando.
The MSU Department of Police and Public Safety was awarded $48,622 in federal stimulus money as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Gov.
New state legislation might make it easier for Michigan residents serving abroad in the military to cast absentee votes and to have them counted in time for Election Day. Operation: Make Our Troops Count is a proposal that would allow service men and women abroad to receive absentee votes electronically via e-mail and then mail them to their local county clerk.
An MSU researcher could unlock genetic factors that contribute to plant invasions with the help of a $630,000 grant awarded by the National Science Foundation. The grant, which will be distributed during the next four years, was awarded last month to Jennifer Lau, a plant evolutionary ecologist with the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station’s Kellogg Biological Station.
Six premedical students from Grand Valley State University have been admitted to the MSU College of Human Medicine under an agreement geared toward students from and wishing to practice medicine in areas with low medical accessibility.
Elshafei Mohamed knows about the prison at Guantanamo Bay almost first-hand. A videographer from his hometown in Sudan, who was captured in Afghanistan, has been held there for five years.
For Franklin, Mich.-based sculptor Russell Thayer, MSU is a family tradition. And for that reason, he said he’s delighted to have one of his sculptures featured on campus.
Although many students might hold post-exam celebrations at a bar or a club, for the students in Nick Bowman’s Communications 399 class, planning a night out on the town is the final exam.
Although guns remain prohibited from MSU campus buildings, those with concealed weapons permits now can carry a firearm through campus, following a MSU Board of Trustees vote Friday.
MSU students could see as much as a 10.1 percent tuition increase during the next two years, the MSU Board of Trustees decided Friday when it approved the 2009-10 university budget guidelines.
Whenever Carl Cafagna hits a note on the sax, clarinet or another instruments he’s mastered, he is carrying on his father’s passion for jazz. “My son became what I always wanted to be,” said Al Cafagna, Carl’s father and a retired MSU philosophy professor.