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."