Thanks to space age harness technology and alien plastics gleaned from UFO crashes, you can now seamlessly integrate a laptop into your body. It goes where you go—like an extension of your flesh and bone. Amazingly, this upgrade only costs $40—but if you act now our trained team of scientists and surgeons will implant a cellphone directly on your skull for no extra charge. [Connect a Desk]

Your heart can beat 3 billion times in your lifetime without maintenance—that's a performance spec that no motor can match. Tens of trillions of cells inside you undergo constant death and regeneration. And your brain juggles countless autonomic and cognitive processes without so much as a status bar. But it was just eight years ago that we decoded our genome, seizing the blueprints for ourselves. We're just starting to understand this machine enough to tinker with it. And Man being Man, we need to tinker.

Techie people like new toys. In the future that will mean everything from artificial limbs that perform better than the originals to benevolent viruses that recode the software of the human body. And as the gadget obsessed, we'd be the ones most likely to sign up first. And to go high end, cutting edge.

Last year I got lasik, and sprung for all the upgrades. Like the cornea mapping system to correct sector by sector aberrations on my eye, the same tech used to remap the flaws in Hubble telescope's glass. And the laser cut instead of the scalpel, which reduces night halos. Everyone else attending the mandatory pre-surgery briefing went budget. But when it comes to our bodies and minds, the gadget-minded think of our flesh and soul as extensible and upgradable with only with the best.

For a far more interesting story, we are lucky to have an amazing guest editor with us this week named Aimee Mulllins—Aimee was born without fibulae in both legs and her doctors decided to amputate her legs below the knees to give her a chance to walk with artificial legs. Eventually, she became the first woman with a disability to compete in the NCAA using carbon fiber equipment modeled after the hind legs of a cheetah. She's also been voted as people magazine's 50 most beautiful people in the world and, at 17, was the youngest person to hold top secret Pentagon security clearance. Some might classify Aimee as handicapped, but I'd call her enhanced. I hope she can share with us what its like to depend on her gear and have it change the way we live and the conditions we're born with.

Through the week, we'll hear from other experts too:

• Daniel H. Wilson, author of How To Survive a Robot Uprising, will be writing about his experiences searching for super-powered strength.

• Sexologist Debby Herbenick will discuss some of the upgrades going on below the belt.

• Our own Mark Wilson, who spent a week hearing about the outer edges and most pressing needs of health science at the TEDMED conference in San Diego, will share his encounters with the stars of organ growing, genome mapping, human body imaging and more.

• In a Q&A with The New Yorker's Michael Specter, we'll see why it's more dangerous to not embark on the paths of genetic and viral manipulation than to follow them to their most unnerving ends.

This week, Gizmodo will be exploring the enhanced human future. We're calling it This Cyborg Life. And its all about what happens when we treat our body less as a holy object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine. Even if we can't replicate it—yet—we can make it better.

Readers and writers and editors for other periodicals and books: if you've got old or new stories that would fit into our theme week, please let me know! We'd love to link you.

There are clearly two directions robot builders can take: trying to create a realistically humanoid robot that looks and moves like a person, and robots that are built to perform specific tasks. The robots used by the military, for example, are completely utilitarian. But they would look really stupid in a wedding dress.

Eventually, maybe these two schools will come together. But I can't help but think that trying so hard to make robots that look like people is a foolish endeavor. Who cares what they look like? Why not just focus on making these robots as useful as possible rather than just pumping out creepy bots that are essentially expensive mannequins. [The Big Picture]

The original test is called the Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, or CAPTCHA. This is CMU-originated modification is called reCAPTCHA. Instead of seeing one word, you see two, one that is already verified as correct. If you think about it, that's the only way the authentication could work. Both words are further distorted to fight spammers who may well have better OCR than the libraries.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter have already started using reCAPTCHA, and right now it's processing one million words per day. That's still chump change, though. According to Luis von Ahn, a professor at CMU:

"There's no danger of us running out of words. There's still about 100 million books to be digitized, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete."

A definite workout, yes, but it's definitely not cool when your manager switches your pay over into the maintenance budget. Oh, you crazy Japanese! – Jason Chen

Nikkei [via Plastic Bamboo]