Gizmodo is running an excellent series this week called “This Cyborg Life.”

The series is described as being about “what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.”

Here’s are some of my favorite stories from the series:

• If 1950s Men Redesigned the Human Form, We’d Be Horrors
• Gadget Singularity: Let’s Ditch Our Buttons and Screens Forever
• This Flight Helmet Collection Will Kill Your Childhood Dreams
• Nature’s Most Wicked-Looking Robot, the Bacteriophage
• Tales of Human Upgrades: Magnetic Fingertips
• Me and My Exoskeleton: The Trick to Super Strength
• The Six Million Dollar Man’s Cyborg Surgery, Adjusted for Today’s Dollar
• Digital Tattoo Interface Turns Your Skin Into A Display
• I Wear My Suncontacts at Night
• Tales of Human Upgrades: Jerry Jalava’s USB Finger
• Audeo Captures Electrical Signals From The Brain To Create Sound

All these are very cool and worth taking the time to read, in my opinion.

The entire series is posted on Gizmodo at “This Cyborg Life.”

Today, the diagnosis of bacterial infections requires growing cultures in a laboratory over a period of days. But new sensors based on various nanomaterials that are being developed for ultrasensitive, rapid DNA detection. Instruments based on the new technology would take from 15 minutes to two hours for a diagnosis.

Benjamin Miller, professor of dermatology and biomedical engineering at the University of Rochester Medical Center, has patented a sensor that is based on a hairpin-shaped strand of DNA, and is complementary to the genetic sequence being targeted. The DNA unfolds when it captures the target gene sequence, causing an attached fluorescent molecule to glow with an indication of “positive” results.

New York based Lighthouse Biosciences is commercializing disposable cartridges to be used with the nanosensor technology.