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Space makes you short, fat and bald!

By Daniel Smith on Jun 8, 09 12:37 PM

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Next time you admire those noble astronauts risking their lives for the betterment of mankind (or at least fixing a spy satellite) just remember if they stayed up there too long they'll end up looking like George Costanza from Seinfeld.

Yep, the heroic space travellers will end up squat, tubby and with shiny heads.

According to a report in Phenomenica, living in zero gravity for too long does nothing for your looks.

Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell, from University College London, says without the pull of the Earth our bones and muscles would waste away.

Well that's a given, you always see astronauts banging on a treadmill so they don't come home like a jellyfish.

george_costanza.jpg

If they don't they'll end up looking like a ball of fudge.

But it also turns out that space folk will have bloated faces and no hair because blood will pool in their skulls and the barnet will no longer be needed for insulation.

In fact, if we embarked on a journey that would take generations to reach a destination, the humans who end up saying 'hi' to ET might not be the best specimens for making a good first impression!

Thinking about it, perhaps that's what happened to William Shatner.

Weird Science Factoid: Apples do a better job keeping you awake in the morning than caffeine. But they don't taste as good with milk and two sugars.

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Authors

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.

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