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ADVOCATE THE MID CITY
GARDEN DISTRICT • SOUTHDOWNS • GOODWOOD • TARA • SPANISH TOWN • CAPITOL HEIGHTS
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THURSDAY APRIL 23, 2015 H
LSU LAKES • MELROSE PLACE • BEAUREGARD TOWN
THEADVOCATE.COM
Darlene Denstorff AROUND MID CITY
DDENSTORFF@ THEADVOCATE.COM
March for Babies set for Saturday The March of Dimes’ March for Babies kicks off at 9:15 a.m. Saturday at the A.Z. Young Park in downtown Baton Rouge. The walk raises money and awareness for the March of Dimes’ efforts to improve the health of babies. Register at http://www. marchofdimes.org/louisiana/ events/10276_3136343334. html.
Anita Smith picks up Cuban oregano and lemon bomb plants during the Louisiana Earth Day celebration Sunday at the North Boulevard Town Square in downtown Baton Rouge.
Earth Here on
Get your hats ready
The Hat Run starts at 7 a.m. Saturday at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The event, which features a 1-mile fun run and walk and a 5K run and walk, promotes skin cancer awareness and provides free, onsite skin cancer screenings. A children’s activity tent will include face painting, hat crafts and sun education. To register, visit thehatrun.com.
Art at Governor’s Mansion
Three Baton Rouge students have their artwork on display this month at the Louisiana’s Governor’s Mansion. This art display is part of the Jindal family’s initiative to feature young artists. On display is art created by Jilly Grace Eskew, a fifth-grader at Episcopal High School; Elizabeth Trahan, a ninth-grader at Hosanna Christian Academy; and Carleen Warner, a ninthgrader at Hosanna Christian Academy.
Miracle League tickets
Tickets are on sale for the Miracle League at Cypress Mounds’ All-Star Game and Fundraiser on May 2. The Miracle League is a baseball league for children with special needs. This community event is set from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Cypress Mounds Baseball Complex on Gardere Lane, with an All-Star game featuring Miracle League players beginning at 1:30 p.m. Advance tickets are $7 and can be purchased at eventbrite.com. Tickets are $10 at the gate and include a hot plate of jambalaya and a beverage.
Advocate photos by C.J. FUTCH
Cale Carlisle, 7, left, and Jesse Noble, 8, paired up at one end of their makeshift laboratory table and created a water filter using a 2-liter bottle, coffee filters, rocks and sand during Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s Engineer It program on Saturday.
Kids learn science behind clean water at Engineer It
BY C.J. FUTCH
cfutch@theadvocate.com
Advocate staff photos by HILARY SCHEINUK
Tatum Cady, 3, and his sister Deja, 7, interact with a western hognose snake held by volunteer Elizabeth Gibert during the Louisiana Earth Day celebration Sunday at the North Boulevard Town Square in downtown Baton Rouge.
Festivalgoers enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the Louisiana Earth Day celebration.
Roses tested to find best suited for La.
Advocate staff report
For flower lovers in Baton Rouge, spring marks the perfect time to visit the LSU Agricultural Center Botanic Gardens’ rose display, said Wanda Ellis, a research associate at the gardens who runs rose trial testing sites for two evaluation programs. Research and evaluation of roses are key to knowing what grows best in different locations. The LSU Photos provided by MICHELLE MILLER Agricultural Center grows roses that are part of Roses are in bloom at the LSU Agricultural Center those evaluation programs. Botanic Gardens at Burden, where researchers One of those evaluation programs, the national are evaluating roses for relatively new research rose evaluation program, once known as the Allprograms that test hardiness and disease resisäSee ROSES, page 2G tance for the region.
Children participating in the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s Engineer It program on Saturday spent the afternoon learning about the water they use every day to stay hydrated, clean and fed. In Engineer It: Water Works, a team of engineers from MWH Global’s Baton Rouge office took turns answering questions about both our local water supply and water supplies in general. Engineer It is part of a series of lessons presented by members of Baton Rouge’s local engineering community at the museum on the third Saturday of the month, said Sheree Westerhaus, planetarium educator. Last month’s program was on bridge building, she said, and LASM is in the process of coming up with more ways to expose area students to engineering, in itself a combination of art and science. The design process for artists is very similar to the problem-solving process used by engineers, said Douglas Kennedy, communications coordinator for the museum. Students learned, when presented with brown water from the Mississippi River just outside the museum’s doors, how the water they drink goes from dirty to clean. “Now, we don’t get our water from the Mississippi River,� Thomas said, “but the city of New Orleans does.� The students mixed in some potting soil to represent the silt and sediment that would normally be in water drawn directly from natural sources, then learned how municipalities go about cleaning the water up for residents. Jeff Duplantis, Sparkle Noble, Theresa Kelly-Brown and James Thomas, of MWH, led the students, ages 6 to 12, through the process of building their own water filtration system with recycled 2-liter bottles, sand and rocks. Jesse Noble, 8, paired up with Cale Carlisle, 7, at one end of their makeshift laboratory table while Cross Carlisle, 10, and Sadie Noble, 12, were at the other. Each station had coffee filters and the 2-liter bottle, cut in half. Following instructions from the engineers, the students put the coffee filter around the neck of the bottle, secured it with a rubber band, and inverted it into the bottom half of the bottle, which would be used to catch the filtered water. Students then added layers of sand and different-sized pebbles to the bottle top, and poured in the dirty water. What dripped out of the filter was still a bit cloudy, but was free of the potting soil “sediment.� The water we drink in Baton Rouge, Duplantis said, went through the same basic filtering process as the water on the lab tables, but used the ground under our feet as the filter layers. “The water we drink in Baton Rouge fell in Mississippi hundreds of miles north of us in the time of the dino-
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äSee WATER, page 2G