Monday, August 3, 2009

Vestigial Organs Not So Useless After All, Studies Find

The purplish, kidney-shaped spleen—at top left in an illustration of the human digestive system—is critical in healing damaged hearts, a July 2009 study of mice says.
Appendix, tonsils, various redundant veins—they're all vestigial body parts once considered expendable, if not downright useless.

But as technology has advanced, researchers have found that, more often than not, some of these "junk parts" are actually hard at work.

Case in point: the spleen, which a new study shows may be critical in healing damaged hearts.

LINK

Via: National Geographic News

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