Muscles and Space

• Two functions of your skeleton are to: (1) provide shape and support for your body(2) enable you to move.

• Skeletal muscles are attached to the bones of your skeleton.

• Muscles work in coordination with your skeletal system and nervous system to make your body move.

• Regular exercise is important for maintaining both muscular strength and flexibility.

• Exercise causes individual muscle cells to grow in size.

• Because your muscles are trained to work in the presence of gravity, without exercise or gravity muscles shrink.

• This is called muscle atrophy.

• Space programs have developed special equipment for astronauts to exercise in space to prevent muscle atrophy.

• Dr. James Hicks is a UCI professor who helped develop some of the exercise equipment used by astronauts.

• Dr. Hicks is a comparative physiologist- he studies how and why animals work.

• Because of his knowledge of gravitational physiology, Dr. Hicks was asked to educate the crew of Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E about the long-term effects of space flight on human physiology.

• His scientific conclusion was that after a long period in space, humans would “look like blobs.”