Mysterious 40ft dinosaur-like sea creature

A huge unknown creature has been caught on camera that has left local residents shocked and scared. It appears to wriggle in and out of the water, as the man behind the camera speculates it could be 40ft long.

David Halbaur, who captured the clip on Okanagan Lake, Canada, believes he may have stumbled across something huge.

“When you’re sitting on the beach on a sunny day, you don’t expect to see a dinosaur coming out of the water,” he told. “It rolled up and down as it went in the water. Another lump of the same thing came up about five metres in front of it. Like a dinosaur, it was like a giant snake.”

The sighting, they said, lasted about two minutes and ended when the creature dived under a nearby log boom.

And now some are claiming it could be the Canadian folklore legend known as Ogopogo, which is said to inhabit the same waters.

Also called the Naitaka, the monster is believed to be a 40-50ft sea serpent, originally written about in the 19th century.

Rollercoaster ride can remove kidney stones

It sounds more like the work of science fiction than scientific fact, but riding on a rollercoaster really could remove a kidney stone. The bizarre finding comes from a group of US researchers who found that patients who were shaken during a ride actually dislodged their stones.

The work has just been awarded an Ig Nobel prize — the anti-Nobels — which are spoof prizes that make people laugh but then think eventually. The inspiration behind the rollercoaster research began several years ago when one of Prof David Wartinger’s patients at Michigan State University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine returned from a holiday trip to Walt Disney World in Florida.

The patient reported that one of his kidney stones became dislodged after a ride on the Big Thunder Mountain ride. The unnamed patient wondered if this was just coincidence and so continued to ride. Sure enough, each time he went on the rollercoaster another stone popped out. Prof Wartinger was intrigued and so built a silicone model of his patient’s renal system, complete with fake kidney stones.

He then took it with him on numerous rides to check out the theory. He found that some rides were more effective than others in removing stones depending how much they ‘rattle’ the rider. Big Thunder Mountain was indeed effective because it involves many up and down and side to side movements.

73,000 years old drawing looks like Hashtag

Scientists have discovered what they claim is the oldest-known human drawing in a cave in South Africa. Looking a little bit like a Hashtag, the drawing is believed to be around 73,000 years old. That predates the previously discovered early scrawling of humans in Asia, Europe and other parts of Africa by around 30,000 years.

It was found in Blombos Cave, which is around 300km (186 miles) west of Cape Town and is described as “a cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre crayon on a ground silcrete flake.” Christopher Henshilwood, a professor from Norway’s University of Bergen, led the discovery team which has published the results of his findings in the journal Nature.

He says calling it art is a bit of a stretch — but it did have some kind of significance. “It is definitely an abstract design; it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker and probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group,” he told. “It’s also evidence of early humans’ ability to store information outside of the human brain,” he said.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 22nd, 2018