Your heart beats around one hundred thousand times a day, every day, for your entire life, pushing blood through a network of vessels that, laid end to end, would wrap around the Earth twice. This episode opens up the heart and the circulatory system — how the pump works, what blood actually does, and what really goes wrong in heart disease, the world's leading cause of death.

You'll come away understanding the heart's two-sided design, the journey of a blood cell around the body, what a heartbeat really is, and the truth about what causes heart attacks.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: Heart Foundation (Australia) – heart health resources; British Heart Foundation – "How the heart works"; American He ...