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.”

In his op-ed column, The Young and the Neuro, David Brooks writes that the attendees at last week’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Society conference were “young, hip and attractive.” These 30-something scholars from fields of psychology, economics, political science and beyond all have in common the hope that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These folks are essentially trying to understand how social behavior changes biology as a complementary process to the way biology (genetics) directly influences behavior.

Brooks shares some great examples of research going on in this burgeoning field. These include perceptual studies of Arabs and Jews (how each perceive images of pain), Yankee and Red Sox fans watching baseball highlights (a look at how we process tribal dominance), and Americans and Japanese (reward structures of dominant versus subordinate behavior).

He concludes that “hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences.” This, he says, shines a bright light on “the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments.”