We've made some significant advancements in medical treatments in the past 10 years. Notwithstanding are advancements in the use of stem cells to treat a variety of otherwise incurable diseases and conditions.
Stem cells are essentially cells we have in our bodies that can be transformed into any other tissue and since they carry our own DNA, if we're able to do just that in a controlled fashion, we can replace other tissues that have been damaged or are missing (as in the case of losing skin (epithelial cells) or even an organ.
Well, thanks to a better understanding of how the cell works and stem cells in general, we are now on our way to be able to cure degenerative auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) by sectioning and curating a patient's healthy bone marrow stem cells to replace the damaged immune system.
Need a new organ? We're working on ways to use stem cells to grow new organs too. This is in my opinion a better option than the 3D printed organs we're also experimenting with, as mentioned in a past blog). Growing an organ uses the DNA road map within our cells to make an organ but takes time to grow. Meanwhile 3D printing an organ could potentially be way faster but perhaps create organs that are less cohesive on a cellular level that one that is slowly grown properly.
One of the most interesting and innovative devices I've seen in medicine recently though, is a bio-chip that delivers specific macro-molecules, such as DNA and perhaps others, to reprogram skin cells to become other types of cells that are needed more at a certain location on the body. Based on my reading, one only need to touch the chip on the problem area, on the skin, and cells below the skin in connected to the touched area receives the chip's instructions and starts to properly reprogram themselves to become other cell types, such as blood vessels, muscle tissue etc... The team working on this from Ohio State University's College of Engineering and Wexner Medical Center also say they've done tests to reprogram cells into neurons. All of this works well in trial on animals such as mice and there is great hope that it would work on humans too.
I elaborate more about what this means for the future of our health in the video below:
Suffice to say that the manipulation of the cells of the patients, whether they be stem cells, skin cells or other cells, to create new health tissues where it is most needed, is definitively key to eradicating some truly serious issues, including auto-immune diseases, serious injuries, organ failures or loss, and many other conditions that up until now could only be controlled in some way.
We're on a very interesting path where we are able to use medical technology to fix complex biological systems like the human body in much the same way as we fix cars nowadays. Got some problem? Not feeling well? Use a smartphone application to self-diagnose first, then go to the clinic for a second opinion and to get the appropriate body part fixed or changed for a new one (from your own cell stock). You leave the clinic feeling better and with perhaps a brand new fully functional part, ready to take on the day.
Think it's fantasy? It really isn't.
Are we there yet? Not quite. This is all experimental and going to clinical trials. However, in about 10 years from now, the notion of fixing your body like bringing your car to the body shop won't sound so science fiction at all.
I've already wrote a lot about self-driven passenger cars rolling out from every single international car manufacturer in the world on or near the year 2020. This is still on track and with so many billions of dollars invested by these monster companies, nothing short of a World War would stop them from deploying according to plan now.
In parallel of course, many of these same manufacturers are helping transportation companies automate as well. But also, in the non-passenger transportation industries, there are other major firms that have plans of their own to deploy self-driven vehicles designed to ferry goods from point A to point B, and yes, some of them directly to consumers.
In the past few months, I've become aware of a couple of entrants in the self-driving space that have made decisive moves, such as Boeing and Airbus. Both are in the air scene and do both passengers and cargo. Now they are making big acquisitions and investments to automate their fleets of vehicles.
Ford and Dominos have decided to pair up to make the Dominos franchise one of the first big fast food franchises to deliver pizzas from oven to dining room without personnel being involved.
And let's not forget the startups that are still pumping out ideas to push it even further in the hopes to becoming dominant themselves in this very exciting area, or to be acquired by larger firms (like Being, Airbus, DHL and so on):
Passenger Flying Drone is giving it a go in competing with Chinese Ehang and Volocopter to enter the scene.
And DelivAir is developing ways to deliver packages directly to the individual smart device that made the order, in the hands of the holder, one would presume, using a specialized drone capable of dropping items from an air tether.
The point is, when we see major, major companies making these acquisitions and trials, we can't have any more doubt our world of transportation is about to change. What kind of changes should we anticipate?
I discuss this further in my video below:
You can guarantee that first major players will network their self-driven vehicles as most of them will use deep learning AI to operate (or something better) and learn from road conditions. This will allow individual vehicles to learn from every other vehicle in the network. A bit later on, one would hope that the software and protocols in these network will converge to a certain type of information that can be also shared with other networks out there. i.e. DHL's fleet of autonomous delivery trucks learning from one another but then also sharing what they learn with the Mercedes delivery truck fleets and vice versa.
This concept of connectivity is very powerful and important for security and safety reasons because these are all machines working at machine speeds. They do take time to "absorb" new information from another source, as they are self-learning AI, but they can do it way faster than any human being could.
Can a human learn how to navigate crowds in a vehicle from literally millions of different situations and conditions internationally all at the same time and make sense of the information? Impossible. But machines can.
We're heading into a world where human beings can definitively focus on what they enjoy doing without worries on how we will move from A to B or how goods are moved from A to B. Where this is heading is a networked transportation system that operates through the Internet and some secure networks that talk with each other that communicates all the information needed to ensure humans always have a safe way to go from place to place efficiently and where goods are always minutes away from where it is needed... all at the touch of a button, or a voice command.
This is all structuring itself thanks to the excitement there is around AI these days, and our readiness as a population to embrace such things to make our lives easier, safer and more enjoyable.
The answer is that we're already surrounded by it in our daily lives.
Google search seems benign enough but it actually uses some fairly good AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms taking in the searcher's past search history, well visited websites, his posts on blogs and forums, online purchase history and so on in order to present options that the AI thinks this particular user will enjoy. Heck it even sniffs out websites for content that is relevant to the search you did based on context instead of strictly using exact keywords.
We already have Siri or Google Assistant on our smartphones, Cortana on our Windows PC and Alexa in the living room connected to a bunch of other devices.
Ok not everybody has all those things or uses all of these, but these are all well known and well distributed artificially intelligent pieces of software packaged in sensor-laden hardware that we are surrounded by.
Heck, stand aside AlphaGo, AI is tackling much more complicated games than Go: One AI recently was able to consistently beat the best DOTA 2 players in the world 1 on 1 after only 2 weeks of learning. Not only that, but AI has also been created with the ability to make games like Mario Brothers after only a few minutes of seeing how the game is played. This last AI just creates the game code from observation.
Development in AI is just beginning with no sign of stopping right now.
In fact investment in AI has increased significantly to such an extent that tech giants such as Google and Baidu have spent between $20bn - $30bn in AI in 2016 alone, and it is expected that investments in general by most technology companies will more than triple by the end of 2017. 90% of these investments are in R&D while only 10% are spent in startup acquisitions.
This movement indicates that we'll be further and further immersed with increasingly large amounts of form factors of AI software integrated into all sorts of connected devices in the next few years.
Technology companies are betting on AI and in order to make things easy for individuals, they are focusing on the basics to start: international communications.
Pretty much every large company is placing their bed on facilitating international communications by investing heavily in speech recognition, hands free voice translators on the go and digital assistants. Here are some of the new devices and news on the subject to update yourself upon:
Google Translate goes mobile in earbuds allowing the instant translation of a conversation into and from 40 different languages.
All in all, with improvements and devices like this, we're much more likely to use AI to assist in our everyday life and then waiting eagerly for the next software update or better yet, if available, being able to directly and obviously participate in the learning process of these AI as they become better at what they do.
Exciting times. I detail in the video below what this all means for us at home and in the workplace as well:
I personally, postulate that groups of people doing any kind of well-being focused group meditation over time, can achieve the same results.
There is little explanations on how this exactly works except for explanations from meditation gurus that promote the idea, but the results seem to be real and validated by officials and statisticians.
This effect is simply called the Maharishi Effect, because many of the experiments in real life were done by the Maharishi University of Management in 1993 and then again in a larger scale experiment between 2007 and 2010.
It's all very mysterious from a scientific point of view. They say that when sufficient amounts of minds focus on well-being, the magic number being the square root of 1% of the nearby population core, using the Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi technique (according to the Maharishi University of Management), this creates a significant influence in the overarching consciousness towards the focus point, well-being, which in turn reduces instances of violent crime in the populated area.
In 1993, the group went to Washington D.C. for several weeks with thousands of members from around the world, peaking at 4,000 on the last week. Now according to the web, the population of Washington D.C. at that time was 600,000 people. If we take the square root of 6,000 (1% of 600,000), you have 77. So according to the Maharishi University of Management, the group had way more people than that to have an effect.
In fact, if I do my math right, we'd need less than 2,000 meditation practitioners in the US to impact the whole country.
Now the results are amazing:
At week 4, there were only 1,200, and the instances of crimes against a person & robberies (together) had decreased only 2%.
As time went on and more people gathered to meditate, at week 5, there were 2,750 people meditating together and the crime rate reduction calculated was then about 7%.
At the end of the 8 weeks, the group size was at its biggest, shy of 4,000 people, and the crime rate had reduced by 23.3%.
The final analysis of the Maharishi group, which was supervised by a 27 -member Project Review Board over the experiment composed of criminologists, sociologists, other university people and the police department was this:
"Based on the results of the study, the steady state gain (long-term effect) associated with a permanent group of 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs was calculated as a 48% reduction in HRA crimes (crimes against a person) in the District of Columbia."
So what they are saying is if large amounts of people would meditate and focus on peace and well-being over protracted slabs of time, or better yet constantly, crimes against people would be cut in half. With these results, I don't really care so much how it works. I'm interested rather in the results. The group had similar results when they did a longer duration stint between 2007 and 2010 in 206 urban areas of high population (100,000 citizens or more). They compared the homicide rates of the nation between those dates in the cities with the homicide rates of the same areas from 2002-2006 and found that during the 2007-2010 period, the homicide rate declined in these areas by 21.2% (5.3% per year). Violent crimes went from a flat trend between 2002-2006 to a declining trend between 2007-2010 of 4.6% per year, totaling 18.5% in the meditation period. Now, one could say that other factors could account for some of that reduction over years such as better policies, better education system, and whatnot, but since these are years of hardship with the economic collapse of 2008, I'm hard pressed to think that. However, I don't have all the data. What I do know is that there is something there, and meditation towards the well-being of our fellow human beings is not only good for our health, but good for our society as well. So there really isn't anything holding us back to just do it. I know from personal experience that it feels real good. My philosophy, the Raelian Movement, meditate a lot and teach it a lot so it's easy for me to just do it. Also, in 2012, our philosophical leader, Raël, started urging us to practice meditation focused on other people's well-being together and in great numbers if possible. The meditations are simple emotional focus exercises directed towards peace and love of others. Everyone can do it, and we started gathering and inviting people to join in regularly, to just take a minute of their time every day, or every hour (if people wish) to do a short 1 Minute Meditation for Peace. We also organize online meditations in multiple languages in Canada on Mondays and sometimes other days of the week. We often have about 100 participants showing up online very Monday from all over North America. Why? Well, though we don't understand exactly HOW it works, we know that the larger amounts of people that do this sort of meditation regularly, the lower the instances of violence (see the data from the Maharishi Experiments above). Since meditating for anything is a personal decision, I decided that on top of participating with my philosophical group, I can also take it upon myself to do it more frequently in my personal life, and of course, being a scientist, attempt to measure my impact on others through the exercise. I thus decided to post a video or picture of me in my daily life Meditating for Peace (1 minute only) and posting it on Facebook for all to see. I decided I would do this for 30 straight days no matter what I was doing. The purpose was to SHOW people I'm doing it, explaining to people what I'm doing and hoping that others seeing it in my network would share and perhaps take a minute as well upon seeing me doing it. And then maybe, they post their own photo and so on. Here is more information on this whole effect in the video below as well as additional comments on my 30 day social experiment:
I have to say, this put me on the spot since I typically use my Facebook and Twitter accounts to talk about scientific stuff and only on occasion about philosophy. Now I was posting pictures of me meditating, intentionally not always on my best looking days or situations. But that was the point. I wanted to show that meditating on loving others and hoping peace on others could be done without makeup, without being shaved, or clean, or lying on your bed. No. It's only a minute of focused thought. It can be done outdoors, during a wash, before eating dinner, while cooking dinner, in any area, on bad hair days (I have one of my meditation pics after I got out of the public pool.. you can imagine the wet disheveled hair....). Anywhere. Thing is, it's not about you. It's all about everyone else. I thought to myself, if I can show others what I'm doing and they do it too, I can perhaps influence the city I'm in. Or perhaps more? Unfortunately, I wasn't set up to measure the level of violence in Ottawa during those 30 days. And frankly my FB friends are really all over the place, so I didn't even attempt to look into that. The objective was to see what was the influence of a single person on others to take the action itself. As shown in the Maharishi experiments, if you have sufficient numbers doing it in the same period and being regular about it, you can reduce violence. So I set out to see if a population that cares enough could mobilize without any centralized organization and potentially generate the same effect as the Maharishi experiments using social media as a way to communicate intent and spread the word of the effort. Here are my official results after 30 days of publicly showing me meditating on Facebook:
30 days of meditation, 1 minute commitment per day = 30 minutes of my time
427 Likes on Facebook (I have roughly 3,000 Facebook friends)
13 Shares and 42 Comments on the posts
Now, I estimated that many of the people that Liked the post probably paused and took a minute knowing that my network is similar to me in mindset (at least those that Liked). So I figured 50% of these people probably were prompted to take 1 Minute and meditate for Peace.
That's 214 people + my 30 meditations. So at first glance, my actions gave birth to 244 minutes of meditation for Peace over a month.
Now, I also assume that a small percentage of those that Liked perhaps posted their meditation, following my example and that they provoked a similar ratio in Likes where 50% likely meditated... I stopped there because I didn't want to go nuts in assumptions in a chain. That is still another 87 minutes added by secondary influence.
So, including me, a total of 360 minutes of meditation happened during the month of September because of my little 30 personal minutes. That's still 6 hours of focused meditation for peace that wasn't going to happen before.
Now if we project in numbers a little bit, assuming the average Joe doesn't have 3,000 Facebook friends, and say that for each person that meditates and shows they are doing it on social media, they influence 5 people to meditate. Not necessarily show their picture, but just take a minute.
Well, that means a small group of 400 regular meditation practitioners, wherever they are in North America, that post their meditations would influence 2,000 meditations for a total of 2,400 meditations per day. This is apparently enough, based on the Maharishi University of Management's numbers, sufficient to reduce violence and crime rates for the whole of North America.
So what I say to you guys is this: whether you believe this has any real effect on violence, or not. This is a great social action that can have HUGE impact on yourself, your family and the continent. The health benefits alone are sufficient reason to do it.
For those of you who are shy about posting on social media, that's fine. Do it anyway because others are. For those of you who aren't shy and wish to make the world a better less violent place, I recommend you post yourself meditating and use #1Min4Peace and share on your favorite social media. The domino effect by being visible to others that respect you will make it all just stronger.
Do it in public at work, when you are at the restaurant before a meal, do it when you are at the dentists office. Let people see you and tell people what you are doing.
People like feeling good right? People like peace and harmony and non-violence right? Many will pick up on the habit because you're doing it an you are showing that it is ok.
When we think about solar panels or solar energy, we always think of hot solar panels that are installed on top of building's roofs over top of shingles or flat surfaces.
Generally, they are an eyesore and expensive to install.
Well, since the solar power business has boomed in many parts of the world, and governments and private sector alike are now interested in powering up their grids with renewable energies, lots of private companies, laboratories and public sector entities have thrown in their cash and started developing solar energy programs, new solar energy techs and programs for the mass market.
Europe, China, India, the US, South Korea and Japan all have invested HUGE amounts in the technology and in some places, like in 2017 India, solar power is just as cheap as coal power!
This is what drives whole businesses to change, including the Energy industry.
And with interest in the market, comes innovation, not only in efficiency, but also in form factor and ergonomics.
I discuss this movement and where it may lead in the video below:
Now for some examples of great looking solar panels:
IKEA
Yep, Ikea is ready to sell you solar panels of its own. Fortunately (or is it unfortunately), you won't be installing these yourself. Experts do it after delivery. They look pretty standard for solar panels, so nothing very beautiful about those, however, it does show that solar panels are becoming a sort of commodity in a similar way that LED lighting has become something of a standard for car lights nowadays.
TESLA
I love Tesla's concepts. They always think of beauty whenever they design something, whether it is their cars, their battery packs and now solar panels on the roof. The image below shows the new concept they are going with. Can you tell that those shingles are actually solar panels? This is a case of camouflage indeed! You wouldn't know if those were solar cells or just normal shingles...
BUILD SOLAR
We've heard of solar roofs and solar windows. But how about making opaque or semi-transparent walls solar power capable as well? This company's concept can make walls look futuristic, have good insulation and generate power as well. I don't think these are out yet, but does show some ideas and innovation.
SKYCOOL SYSTEMS
This is a spinoff company from Stanford University and these are NOT solar panels. What they do is perhaps act to avoid additional energy needs for cooling buildings in hot areas or hot times of the year, thus avoiding the need for solar panels in the first place. Less juice needed for cooling = less energy demand on the building. The concepts currently look like ugly solar panels, unfortunately, but they could be melded properly to a roof surface in a similar way to the Ikea idea for solar roofs (or perhaps better), once they get these into commercial form factors. What these panels do is absorb thermal energy (heat) from the bottom surface in contact with the building and shoot the radiation out into the cold, cold vacuum of space. It's top reflective surface reflects 97% of all of the sun's energy back to where it came from, thus keeping the building cool even in strong heat. Now, these clever guys thought of something pretty neat: what if they coat solar panel surfaces with their energy re-transmission material? That has the effect of keeping the solar panel cooler (increasing solar panel efficiency), and keeping the building underneath cooler as well, thus reducing the need for electricity in the first place. So combining both material and solar panel tech could potentially require us to use fewer solar panels and still have energy to spare. Great idea guys!
All in all, the Solar Energy industry is just gearing up as costs for solar are down enough to warrant such investments. This will in turn make solar energy even more cost-effective than it is now... and with clever people working on these, we can have nice homes and offices, fully charged, nice to look at, and COOL!
I keep receiving articles every week on lots of subjects. What I find fascinating is that just about every week I receive at least one other bit of news on how to detect or treat cancer. Not only that, but what is shared is amazing!
Most people are quite discouraged and confused about cancer. The disease is unlike most other diseases that we encounter and it is in the top two diseases in North America for fatalities. Part of the problem is that that it isn't a single disease, just like heart disease isn't a single disease either.
I would better qualify cancer as a condition where cells in a person's body have mutated in such a way that they divide uncontrollably. Depending on the type of mutation, the type of cell it happens and where the mutation occurs specifically, the person afflicted can be affected by a wide variety of cancer types from hard tumors to independent cancerous cells floating about like what happens when one gets leukemia (blood cancer). Here is one of several possible definitions for Cancer.
Because there are as many kinds of cancers as there are people, the more great treatment tools we have at our disposal, the better.
I talk about this and new interesting treatments in the video below. I also did a short summary of each new piece of information right afterwards too.
Let's get started with some new diagnostics tools people can use by themselves (or could do so soon):
Diagnose pancreatic cancer using a smartphone app: 2 friends of mine died of pancreatic cancer in the past 10 years or so. They were both surprised of the discovery and they both died less than 6 months after diagnosis. This type of cancer is usually very aggressive and the 5 year survival rate is just 9%. Now we have an app that scans the color of the whites of our eyeballs for signs of this form of cancer. This allows individuals to check for this type of cancer and detect it way, way before it gets too late, thus allowing them to seek treatment much sooner.
Pen-like tool allowing surgeons to detect cancerous tissue during operations: for some cancers, the best way to get rid of it is to remove the cancer itself. This is somewhat easy if all the cancer is located in a single or multiple easy to identify tumors. However, if the surgeon doesn't get all the cancerous cells out, it will just regrow again. This pen-like tool would allow surgeons to detect remaining cancerous tissue before and during the operation to make sure they get it all out. It will even detect tumors if it in marginal areas between normal and cancerous tissues with a 96% success rate. Though the article doesn't say, I presume this could be used at home or in clinics to detect skin tumors since they can be accessed without a scalpel.
Now for more treatment methods doctors will be able to add into their toolbox to defeat cancer:
Zika virus solicited to help cure deadly glioblastomas: Glioblastomas are nasty. It is a type of brain cancer that forms a tumor that looks like a spiderweb, embedding itself in the brain in such a way that doctors cannot operate to remove it. You're left with chemotherapy and other non-operation therapies to have any hope for a cure. What the researchers did is they modified the virus so that it would kill only the cancerous cells (this specific type) while leaving normal cells alone. It is leveraging a virus that is known to affect the specific cells that turn into glioblastomas. This is very exciting and not the only virus that has been tested to do this sort of thing to specifically target cancer cells. In fact many labs are testing different viruses to target and kill specific cancer types all over (all kinds of cancers affecting all kinds of cells).
Using gold nano-particles to destroy cancer cells: This is not absolutely new but researchers are getting better and better results. What this entails is to inject the area where the tumor is located with gold nano-particles that migrate preferably to the tumorous tissue because of the open vasculature present in tumors. Then, lasers are used to focus on the tumorous growth, heating up the nano-particles enough that they destroy the cells. Normal tissue is generally left alone and left unharmed by the nano-particles as well. To get good results though, the researchers have to combine this treatment with standard immunotherapy.
CAR-T cancer treatment approved by FDA: This is a new treatment that has just been approved for use in hospitals, and it is the first such treatment that uses the patient's own immune cells to generate a custom cure. In essence, the treatment consists of taking the patient's T-Cells and programming them to attack the blood cancer cells that is causing the patient's cancer. There is a caveat though: the FDA has only approved the treatment for when the patient has no other resort. It is new and currently costs nearly $500,000 USD because it is so specific. However, if it is your last resort, why not? Especially when the treatment has shown, for now, a success rate of 83% in putting serious cancers like Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) into remission. It is speculated that this technique may, with time, be useful to treat other types of cancers and even tumors but more tests
All in all, the news are pretty good. With more ways to diagnose cancers early (and potentially by ourselves), more people will survive their cancers. With more ways to tackle this beast, more people will survive their cancers.
So... good news... and more to come. We'll get there...
I talk a lot about artificial intelligence, it's potential, it's promise and it's danger these days. Most individuals I speak to agree that AI will allow for most manual tasks to be automated very soon. They also agree that AI will be able to be infinitely more efficient at doing tasks like transportation, cleaning and construction. With some explanation, they concede that AI will be highly efficient and better than humans at doing tasks requiring some creativity or intuition like guessing, analysis and speculation, because those can be trained using the large amount of data available through the Internet.
Then people have a very hard time even considering AI would be able to be artists. As they say: this is the realm of humans. Only humans can be creative, they say. Otherwise, what would we be doing in a number of years? How would we be useful to society if the last type of activity where we excel at can be done better by artificial intelligence?
Of course, this is a reaction of fear.
The truth is, AI laboratories are already experimenting with deep learning AI and have achieved interesting early results: AI can be trained to be creative and make music.
In the following video I discuss a bit more about the social and philosophical implications of this advancement:
What creative AI needs to get started is inspiration. The sort of inspiration they need is similar to what human artists need really: life experience. In this case, since we're not interested in spending years teaching the AI about life in general, the scientists taught their creative AI about the type of art. In essence, they gave them a huge amount of music to digest, from different styles and then through code and algorithms, gave them the ability to make completely original music.
What these AI are capable of is basically the same as what human artists are able to do: get inspired by what they "know" and create something new. They use algorithms called deep learning algorithm where the AI has access to large amounts of appropriate data for the task and then set to "learn" how to play with the data to get target results. If the training period is successful, the AI is able to get the results we were interested in with the data on their own and can continue to learn over time. Neat huh?
Here are a couple recent examples for you guys to check out.
First is the example of the Marimba-playing robot Shimon from the Georgia Institute of Technology. It is fed four measures of music and then it goes on its own to create the rest of the music on it's own, inspired by both the first measures, which provide a specific desired style, and it's huge databanks of recorded music. See it in action here:
Second is the example of Amper AI, which is a commercial venture that allows artists to create music by providing the AI with a style and tempo, and it'll create music on its own. This is a beta product that has already been used by artist Taryn Southern to make new songs. After the AI has produced the musical score, the person using Amper AI can adjust and layer on lyrics and other pieces of pop music to taste. Here is more information about the effort.
Music made by Amper AI, for example when asked to make music styled after the Beatles (lyrics were provided by a human being):
Here is Taryn's song made using Amper IA, after made into a music video (lyrics and video by Taryn. Instrumental elements are all Amper AI):
With great commercial ventures out and fantastic research on creative deep learning AI, we're sure to see more and more people using it and of course for the technology to become way more refined and advanced in a very short amount of time.
Stay tuned and for those interested, you can start playing with some of these projects yourself!
