When Charles Reilly and Donald Ingber set out to make their short film--In the Beginning, an homage of sorts to Star Wars that (spoilers) tells the tale of a single sperm's triumph in a literal life or death race to fertilize an egg--they had just one goal. Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and Reilly, a biochemistry researcher also at the Wyss Institute, wanted the animated film to be scientifically accurate. To achieve this, the two reached for techniques more common to the silver screen than the lab. They sought digital imaging software ordinarily used by video game designers and film animators. Not only did they achieve cinematic glory, but by reaching far outside the scientific silo they were able to happen upon a new discovery: an understanding of the molecular-level mechanics that let a sperm whip its tail back and forth to fuel its need for speed.

Robots are great at a lot of things--brute force, repetition, and speed, for instance (though maybe not walking). Now add to that list one of the most human of human endeavors: smoking. That's right, researchers have built a chain-smoking robot. And not because they want a real-life Bender. Forcing a robot to smoke could help scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute solve the mysteries of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease--the intense coughing and lung infections that plague smokers.

Researchers working to discover more about how smoke impacts people's health have developed an artificial human lung "airway on a chip" and a smoking robot to carry out more accurate tests. The work will help further our understanding of conditions like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), an irreversible inflammatory disease of the lung's small airways, and will aid with investigations into newer smoking-related trends like vaping. "It's like a Gatling gun, a round turret with 10-12 cigarettes mounted in it," is how Dr. Donald Ingber, director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, described the cigarette-smoking bot to Digital Trends. "We then use an automated car cigarette lighter to touch the cigarette to light it. You can tune its puffing frequency, intensity and intervals -- and then observe what happens as the smoke is fed from the machine and passed through the airspace of the small airway chip."