Mondo Knows Facts
A fetal heart starts beating around five weeks
A cluster of cardiac cells begins contracting before the chambers are fully formed The embryonic heart begins as a tube that folds and partitions into chambers. Its first contractions appear at roughly five weeks of gestation and settle near 110 beats per minute. The rate climbs to a peak of about 170 before easing slightly in later pregnancy. It sits in Mondo's human body collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Fine fetal hair called lanugo is shed before birthA downy coat covers the fetus from about twenty weeks and mostly disappears by termThe neural tube seals during the fourth weekThe flat neural plate folds into a closed tube that becomes brain and spinal cordHeart cardiac muscle works continuously without fatigueSpecialised myocardial fibres generate rhythmic contractions throughout lifeThe human heart beats over one hundred thousand times dailyPumping continuously the heart propels thousands of litres of blood every dayThe right lung is larger than the left lungThe left lung features two lobes instead of three to make room for the heartBlood pressure records two phases of the heartbeatThe higher figure marks ventricular contraction and the lower figure marks relaxation
🫀 Human Bodyfact 182 of 200
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Tags: fetus, heart, development
A fetal heart starts beating around five weeks: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A cluster of cardiac cells begins contracting before the chambers are fully formed. The figure is taken from CDC, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a human body fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Human Body shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.