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.”

Singularity University

The inaugural graduates of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley school backed by NASA, Google Inc., and tech industry luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, unveiled their grand visions on Thursday for leveraging emerging technologies to solve humanity’s great challenges.

Before a filled conference room at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, the students faced the dual pressures of presenting what were both final class projects for the faculty on hand, as well as business pitches to the venture capitalists and business leaders in attendance. Most, if not all, of the four teams hope to secure the funding necessary to transform their ideas into viable ventures.

The stated mission of the unaccredited university, founded in 2008, is to foster leaders who will build on rapid advances in and convergence across areas like biotechnology, supercomputing, nanotechnology and robotics to address intractable problems.

During the nine-week interdisciplinary graduate studies program, the 40 students were asked to develop projects that could help 1 billion people within 10 years. The individuals divided themselves into four teams focused on different challenges.

Full article from SFGate.