Source: Article written by Tal Ezer
What is the only organ that develops in the body of a baby during pregnancy?
Does a soft-born man identify his mother?
Do babies prefer a female voice over a male voice? How many minutes is a baby born?
And what is the highest chance of a fetus surviving a pregnancy?
Here are 45 interesting scientific facts about infants:
1. An infant cannot taste salt until 4 months of age. The delay may be related to kidney development that begins to process sodium only at around this age.
2. In medieval Europe, leeches were used to treat infants' diseases. For example, leeches were placed on the trachea of a coughing baby.
3. In China, every 30 minutes a baby is born with a defect. The country's birth defects have been on the rise by almost 40% since 2001.
4. The protein that binds the baby skull is called - Noggin.
5. A baby's eyes are about 75% of their adult life. His vision in his youth is not sharp, but at six months reaches 6/6.
6. Right-handed children have a higher tendency to turn their heads to the right than to the left.
7. The inner ear is the only sensory organ that fully develops before birth. It reaches its full size in mid-pregnancy.
8. The baby has about 10,000 taste buds. Much older than marble. These, not only on the tongue but also on the sides and oral cavity. Eventually, the extra taste buds disappear.
9. Adults have 206 bones, but when a baby is born it has 300. Baby bones connect to each other during the growth process, which explains the "decrease" in the amount of bones in the body.
10. The baby's intestines are about 29 cm in size. The length will be doubled until the baby becomes an adult.
11. A baby who is born to urinate every 20 minutes, and at the age of six months, he urinates about every hour.
12. Human babies are the only ones who smile at their parents.
13. Every 3 minutes, a baby is born in the world.
14. Famous premature babies: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Jean Jacques Russo, Napoleon Bonaparte, Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, Stevie Wonder, Jehan Goethe, Sir Winston Churchill.
15. The largest number of children born to a woman is 69. From 1725-1765 a rural woman from Russia gave birth to 6 twin pairs, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quartets.
16. Scientists believe that the shaking of the head that says "no" is because as babies, we would turn our heads away from food when we were seventy.
17. A baby can detect his mother's smell and voice shortly after birth. At the same time, it takes several weeks to differentiate her appearance from that of other women.
18. The first social smile of a baby appears between 4-6 weeks after birth.
19. At birth, babies have no knees. The knees fully develop only 6 months later.
20. Babies born in May weigh about 200 grams more than children born in other months.
21. Studies show that infants born to Caesarean section may have difficulty breathing, as they may miss important hormonal and physiological changes that occur during childbirth.
22. During the nine months between conception and childbirth, the baby's weight increases 3,000 times. From the time of birth to the end of the second year, it has increased 4x.
23. A baby's head is relatively huge and accounts for a quarter of the total body length. In comparison, in an adult, the head is only one-eighth the length of the body.
24. At birth, a baby's heartbeat reaches 180 beats per minute. Within a few hours, the pulse drops to 140. At one year old, the heart rate is 115 beats per minute. The average heartbeat of an adult at rest ranges from 70-80 beats per minute.
25. Up to the age of 7 months, a baby can breathe and swallow at the same time.
26 . A baby changes an average of 7,500 diapers a year.
27. On average, female sex babies are more likely to be in the womb a day than male sex babies. White babies are in the womb 5 days longer than black babies and Indian babies are six days longer than white babies.
28. Studies show that the best chance of a fetus surviving a pregnancy is when the mother is 22 - an age defined as "the age of childbearing."
29. The chances of having twins are particularly high in various parts of the West African countries. For example, in Nigeria the chance is 1 to 22. In contrast, Japan has a lower tendency to have twins, with a 1 in 200 chance.
30. In general, male infants are heavier than female infants.
31. The brain of a newborn baby accounts for 10% of its body weight. At the end of the first year of life, the baby's brain grows two-and-a-half times, and by the end of the fifth year it is 3 times larger than it was at birth. In all stages, the male's brain is slightly larger than the female's. In adults the weight drops to 2%.
32. Babies are born with natural swimming skills and can hold their breath underwater. However, this ability disappears as they grow.
33. Around the age of six months, a baby learns that each object is unique. Until this time he assumes whenever he sees a bird on a tree, that it is always the same bird.
34. Brain scans reveal that male infants have more asymmetric brain lobes than those found in female infants. It has also been found that the brains of female infants tend to have greater symmetry in the part of the brain that deals with complex mental processes.
35. The term "infant" (in English - Infant) is taken from the Latin word infants - meaning "cannot speak".
36. Most babies will lose the hairline with which they were born in the first three or four months of their life.
37. An ancient custom of the Greeks was to spit on themselves to fend off the evil eye. This ritual was also applied to infants. Medieval nurses used to lick the babies' faces while peasants around the world would spit on them.
38. Historians estimate that 18th-century babies were four times more likely to die as murder victims.
39. In medieval Europe, disturbed infants were defined as the result of spoiled breast milk.
40. Until the 19th century, infants were not considered to have personality, and thus did not need physical and psychological grooming as we know it today.
41. Until the 19th century, parents refrained from using redheaded babies, as it was customary at that time for infants to absorb the characteristics of the person caring for them, and many parents feared that their babies would cling to redheads.
42. In various parts of England, the head of a baby is washed bromely for luck. A common practice throughout Europe is to give the baby a taste of butter and a little sugar to symbolize the wealth they wish for.
43. Psychologists believe that a baby's self-awareness develops around the age of one year.
44 . Babies in medieval Europe were often tightly wrapped in linen strips because they thought this would help their arms and legs grow straight. This swaddle was also used to curb baby movements.
45. Babies generally prefer a female voice over a male voice, which may explain why people tend to raise the tone of their voice when talking to babies.
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