No organ quite symbolizes love like the heart. One reason may be that your heart helps you live, by moving ~5 liters (1.3 gallons) of blood through almost 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) of blood vessels every single minute! It has to do this all day, everyday, without ever taking a vacation! Now that is true love. Learn about how the heart works, how blood flows through the heart, where the blood goes after it leaves the heart, and what your heart is doing when it makes the sound “Lub Dub”.

Where does your blood go after it leaves the heart? Your body has a fantastic pipeline system that moves your blood around to drop off oxygen and food to those hungry cells, and removes cell waste. Learn how arteries carry blood away from the heart, how veins bring blood back to the heart, and about the different layers of cells that make up these blood vessels.

Using the stethoscope to check blood pressure is a technique that’s been used for >100 years! Blood pressure is one of the major vital signs frequently measured by health care workers, and it tells us a lot about our blood circulation. Learn what blood pressure is, how it relates to resistance in a tube, why it is necessary to get oxygen to your cells, and how it can change as you age. We’ll finally put it all together by relating pressure, flow, and resistance in one awesome equation!

The human body enjoys stability. For example, if your blood pressure changes, the body puts a couple of brilliant systems into motion in order to respond and bring your blood pressure back to normal. There are some quick responses using nerves and some slower responses using hormones. The system using hormones is sometimes called the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone-system (RAAS), which is the main system in the body for controlling blood pressure. When your blood pressure drops too low or gets too high, your kidneys, liver, and pituitary gland (part of your brain) talk to each other to solve the problem. They do this without you even noticing! Learn how the body knows when the blood pressure has changed, and how hormones like angiotensin 2, aldosterone, and ADH help return blood pressure to back to normal.