Is Your Heart The Size Of Your Fist

NOVA Online: Cut To The Heart (see bottom of page for navigation)

Heart sidebar (see bottom of page for navigation)

Astonishing Center Facts

Certain, you lot know how to steal hearts, win hearts, and interruption hearts. But how much practice you really know about your heart and how it works? Read on to your heart'south content!

Put your hand on your heart. Did you place your hand on the left side of your chest? Many people do, but the heart is actually located almost in the center of the chest, between the lungs. It'southward tipped slightly so that a role of it sticks out and taps against the left side of the chest, which is what makes it seem as though it is located there.
Hold out your hand and make a fist. If you're a kid, your eye is about the aforementioned size as your fist, and if you're an adult, it's about the aforementioned size as 2 fists.
Your middle beats about 100,000 times in one 24-hour interval and near 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human centre will beat more than two.five billion times.
Requite a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze. You're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body. Even at rest, the muscles of the eye work hard—twice as hard equally the leg muscles of a person sprinting.
Experience your pulse by placing two fingers at pulse points on your cervix or wrists. The pulse you lot experience is claret stopping and starting as information technology moves through your arteries. Every bit a kid, your resting pulse might range from 90 to 120 beats per infinitesimal. As an adult, your pulse rate slows to an average of 72 beats per minute.
The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is nearly the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Your body has about 5.half dozen liters (half-dozen quarts) of claret. This 5.six liters of blood circulates through the torso three times every infinitesimal. In one day, the claret travels a full of nineteen,000 km (12,000 miles)—that's four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.
The heart pumps nearly i one thousand thousand barrels of blood during an average lifetime—that's enough to fill up more than than iii super tankers.
lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB. Sound familiar? If yous heed to your eye beat, yous'll hear two sounds. These "lub" and "DUB" sounds are made by the heart valves equally they open and shut. See the valves in activeness.