Doctors have a new way of thinking about how to treat heart and skeletal muscle diseases. Body builders have a new way of thinking about how they maximize their power. Both owe their new insight to high-energy X-rays, cloud computing, and a moth.

The understanding of how muscles get their power has been greatly expanded, and the results are published in an online article in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The Royal Society is the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences.

The basics of how a muscle generates power remain the same: Filaments of myosin tugging on filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle—but the power doesn’t just come from what’s happening straight up and down the length of the muscle, as has been assumed for 50 years.

Instead, University of Washington-led research shows that as muscles bulge, the filaments are drawn apart from each other, the myosin tugs at sharper angles over greater distances, and it’s that action that deserves credit for half the change in muscle force scientists have been measuring.

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