A team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has developed a research system that can smoke cigarettes. The gatling gun style system has a mechanical element that can light and puff cigarettes to get the smoke. Surprisingly this system is not named Patty or Selma.

The machine simulates how smoke affects humans by passing smoke through a custom designed “airway-on-a-chip.” The plan is that this system will lead to a better understanding of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and also won’t kill any lab rats along the way. The team published their work in an article in the journal Cell Systems.

You can check out the cigarette smoking machine in action in the video clip below:

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to the day when machines become addicted to cigarettes and get winded trying to hunt us down.

[via IEEE Spectrum via Laughing Squid]