Heart facts and facts about hearts, from the Random Facts shelf.
40 facts on this shelf
"Even someone who doesn't know much about horses can learn a lot about equine health just by watching the post parade from the stable to the gates during the May 6 Kentucky Derby, says an equine veterinarian at Purdue University."
A healthy horse has a resting heart rate, of 40-45 beats per minute.
The respiratory rate of an adult horse at rest is 8-16 breaths per minute.
A horse's body temperature is between 98 and 101 degrees.
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David; Clubs - Alexander the Great; Hearts - Charlemagne; and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
If a woman reaches her 50th birthday without cancer or heart disease, she can expect to see 92.
Maine Coons can carry a gene mutation linked to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease that thickens the heart muscle, so responsible breeders use DNA tests to screen breeding cats.
Ragdolls have their own breed-specific gene mutation linked to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), and DNA testing helps breeders avoid passing it on.
Sphynx cats are prone to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart disease that thickens the heart muscle, so regular heart screenings are recommended.
A blue whale's heart weighs about 400 pounds, roughly the size of a golf cart, according to scientists who preserved one in 2014.
A "Damascus moment" means a sudden change of heart, and it comes from Saint Paul's conversion.
The heart beats about 100,000 times a day and more than 2.5 billion times over an average lifetime.
The heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood a day.
The heart has its own electrical system, so it can keep beating briefly outside the body as long as it has oxygen.
Laid end to end, the blood vessels in one human body would stretch about 60,000 miles.
An adult human heart is about the size of a fist.
Broken heart syndrome is a real condition in which intense stress temporarily weakens the heart muscle.
Women are more likely than men to have heart attack symptoms besides chest pain, like nausea, shortness of breath, or back or jaw pain.
Surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in South Africa in 1967.
Cancer that starts in the heart is very rare, partly because heart muscle cells rarely divide.
The heart sits near the center of the chest, tilted slightly to the left.
The liver receives blood from two sources, the hepatic artery and the portal vein, and about a quarter of the blood the heart pumps passes through it every minute.
The left lung is smaller than the right to make room for the heart.
An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills and one pumps it to the rest of the body.
Jellyfish have no brain, heart, or bones, and their bodies are about 95% water.
Researchers used spinach leaves as a framework to grow heart tissue.
Swami Satchidananda's teachings influenced Dr. Dean Ornish's heart disease program.
In Hearts, the goal is to score as few points as possible by avoiding hearts and the queen of spades.
In Hearts, "shooting the moon" means taking every heart and the queen of spades.
Microsoft added Hearts to Windows partly to show off its networking features.
The queen of spades, sometimes called "Black Maria," is worth 13 points in Hearts.
Hearts players pass three cards before each hand.
Hearts descends from an old game called Reversis.
Each Hearts hand has 26 points.
Hearts is usually played by four players.
In Omnibus Hearts, the jack of diamonds subtracts 10 points.
In Hearts, you usually can't lead a heart until hearts have been "broken."
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft revealed a heart-shaped region on Pluto in 2015.
During mummification, Egyptians often removed the brain through the nose but usually left the heart in the body.
French doctor René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 after rolling up paper to listen to a patient's heart.
Digital stethoscopes can record heart sounds and use AI to help find problems.
René Laennec's stethoscope helped doctors diagnose lung and heart diseases.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney had his heart device's wireless feature disabled to prevent hacking.