An astronaut can hold a tool in space, loosen their fingers, and watch it stay put. Nothing drops. Nothing tugs downward. Yet the brain does not simply forget gravity because the body has left Earth. That mismatch sits at the center of a new study on how people grip and move objects in orbit. The research found that even after months in weightlessness, astronauts still handled objects as if gravity might interfere. Their hands applied too much force, especially during movement, suggesting the brain kept predicting a pull that was no longer there. The work, led by Philippe Lefèvre and colleagues at Université catholique de Louvain and Ikerbasque, looked at one of the most ordinary actions people perform, picking up and moving an object, and placed it in one of the least ordinary environments possible. A habit the nervous system does not easily erase On Earth, the brain constantly coordinates two related forces when a person handles an object. One is grip force, the pressure from the fingers. The other is load force, the force …