People and posters stood scattered throughout the Green Center for the Performing Arts last night.
Seniors unveiled showcase presentations on research projects that spanned the spring semester or the entire academic year.
Josh Champion showed-off his research project that focused on how the sun affects human skin.
"The first semester was spent setting up the study," Champion said. "Then, the second [semester] we focused on finding participants and then running it."
For the study, he took two photos of a face, one with an ultra violet filter that allowed the researchers to see about three millimeters under the skin. The filtered photo was compared to a copy of the same photo without the filter.
Champion also gave out skin cancer pamphlets and showed videos to raise awareness.
Amy Clark, Caitlin Cleary, Micheline Figel and Joseph Tedeschi spent the entire year planning their project.
"Our project was based off of a similar one conducted in Panama, just on a much smaller scale," Cleary said.
While their project was based on a plot of land about 10 by 10 meters wide, the premise was the same: map the amount of trees and shrubs in the DePauw Nature Park.
Such a map was made back in 2008, but now the four seniors are mapping it out again to see how the forestry has changed.
The group mapped, tagged and measured over 1,700 trees and 3,600 shrubs and saplings, including the Ash and Sassafras species.
Leah Freestone based her project on a flower called Saponaria officinalis, commonly called the Bouncing Bet or Common Soapwort.
The flower is hermaphroditic, which means it changes from male to female. The change takes one to three days, and the flowers also change color from white to pink.
"It's adorable science," Freestone said.
She investigated whether or not the color change was beneficial.
"We thought maybe pollinators were more attracted to the pink," Freestone said, "so we stared at flowers for a long time."
She found that pollinators were actually attracted more to the white.
"We wondered if the pink ones produced more seeds, so we counted 20,000 seeds and found that they actually produce less," Freestone said.
Since the data was inconclusive, Freestone believes it is possibly comporable to a sunburn on human skin: the longer we stay in the sun, the pinker we get.
Although the poster presentations are over and the posters taken down, the seniors will continue to present their projects to a panel of professors for the rest of the week. Students can attend the presentations as well; the times and schedules can be found on DePauw Weekly.