7 Fascinating Facts About the Human Heart

Scientists Have Grown a Beating “Mini-Heart” in a Lab

In a slightly Frankensteinian breakthrough, Austrian researchers built a fully beating “mini-heart” in a laboratory in 2015 to learn more about how the human heart develops in utero. The sesame seed-sized organoid, designed to mimic the activity of a 25-day-old human embryo’s heart, was meant to give researchers a better model for studying how congenital heart defects occur. Previously, experiments had relied on animals.

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