MINNEAPOLIS — Stephen Colbert is away from late-night TV following emergency surgery last week — the comedian's appendix burst. That made us wonder: What does the appendix do for our body? And why are ...

For more than a century, the human appendix has been written off as a biological relic, a shrunken leftover from plant-eating ancestors that serves no real purpose. That view is now outdated. A ...

The human body is still a mystery, and some organs have largely been considered useless in one way or another. However, the ...

In “The Descent of Man,” he described the appendix as a vestige: a leftover from plant-eating ancestors with larger digestive organs. For more than a century, that interpretation shaped both textbook ...