Berita Hari Ini: What newborns have in their hearts


	December 18, 2025

Original photo by FatCamera/ iStock

Humans are born with a hole in the heart.

Even if you've never heard of a foramen ovale, you probably had one at one point in your life. It's the name given to the small opening between the upper heart chambers that forms as a baby grows in the womb and usually closes within the first few weeks of infancy.

Once a baby is born, the pressure caused by blood pumping through the heart usually closes the foramen ovale on its own. When it doesn't close, it's known as a patent foramen ovale (PFO) and usually has no ill effects; about 25% of the population have a PFO, most of whom don't even know it.

The heart has four chambers — two atria on top and two ventricles below — and though no one's sure what causes patent foramen ovale, genetics are assumed to play a role. The biology of infants is wonderfully weird in other ways as well. Babies are born with nearly 100 more bones than adults — about 300, whereas grownups have 206. Many of those excess bones are actually made of cartilage and fuse together throughout childhood.

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"Infant" comes from a Latin word meaning "unable to speak."

We tend to think of the word "infant" as simply meaning a very young baby, with most people considering infancy to end at 1 year old. The word's etymology is more specific, however: "Infant" comes from the Latin word infans, which means "unable to speak" or "incapable of speech." The Latin term has been in use since at least the 14th century, with "in-" meaning "not, opposite of" and "fans" meaning "to speak." The word used to refer to children as old as 7, but its scope has since narrowed to our current definition.