It’s Valentine’s Day, which means that you can buy heart-shaped everything — from boxes of chocolates, to pendants, candies of all types, to pizza. Yes, pizza.
But let’s take a moment to think about the not-really-heart-shaped organ that inspired all this, the human heart.
With every tick of the second hand, your heart probably beats at least once. That’s thousands of times an hour, every hour, including while you sleep, without you ever thinking about it. The muscle cells in your heart are perfectly evolved to be resistent to fatigue — just think if you could “rest-up” your biceps while doing curls for a while, just slower.
That marvelous little muscle pump — about the size of your fist, they say — generates enough power to send your five litres of blood coursing happily through arteries and capillaries, bringing oxygen to hungry cells everywhere. Thanks, heart!
Here’s what Leonardo da Vinci thought of the human heart:
That’s a heckuva lot better than the <3 I can draw.
Grant Hamilton
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