Today is International Heart Day. A heart could be the most important organ in our body, pumping blood and oxygen and nutrients in our body and carrying the metabolic waste like carbon dioxide to the lungs.
The muscular organ pumps blood non-stop from a foetus stage until one ceases to live, that is when the heart stops. The heart pumps about 55-80 ml (1/3 cup) of blood with each beat for adults and around 25-85 ml per beat for children. Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. An adult heart pumps about 6,000-7,500 litres of blood daily. The average adult body contains almost five litres of blood, which continually circulates throughout the body.
In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km that’s nearly six times the distance across India from end to end. The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime—that’s enough to fill more than three supertankers or sixty swimming pools. According to the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), a swimming pool for Olympic and world championship events must measure 50 m by 25 m with a depth of at least 2 m for a total volume of 16,000 oil barrels.
Heart transplants are not infrequent anymore and harvesting of hearts from the brain-dead, as like other organs common. Heart surgeries are more successful and the fatality or failures or lesser than in comparison to various other surgeries.
Be that as it may, besides the biological definition, the heart is also presumed for joining or breaking relationships. A failed love is described as heartbroken, and a rude lover, heartless, none blaming the brain, which controls the thinking.
The average heart is the size of a fist in an adult. The fairy fly, which is a kind of wasp, has the smallest heart of any living creature. The American pygmy shrew is the smallest mammal, but it has the fastest heartbeat at 1,200 beats per minute, turtles have 25 beats per minute and whales have the largest heart of any mammal, and a blue whale’s heart beats just twice a minute when it dives for food. The giraffe has a crooked heart, with their left ventricle being thicker than the right. This is because the left side has to get blood up the giraffe’s long neck to reach their brain.
There are also numerous animals with no hearts at all, including starfish, sea cucumbers and coral. Jellyfish can grow quite large, but they also don’t have hearts, or brains, or central nervous systems. It’s working for them, though. They’ve been around at least 500 million years.
What about world politicians?
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide Voix
Pic: Kamadeva, the Hindu God of love.
