■ SAO PAULO. Termite hunters find 200-year-old mummy. Exterminators looking for termites in a monastery in Brazil?s biggest city of Sao Paulo found a mummy and a skeleton believed to be at least 200 years old, the head of the monastery said recently. ?There were some mounds of termite dust and the exterminators broke into the walls to see what was in there,? Father Armenio Rodrigues Nogueira, who is in charge of the monastery, one of the city?s oldest, told Reuters. ?It was a huge surprise.?

The bodies, believed to be two nuns, were found weeks ago, but officials at the Mosteiro da Luz (Monastery of Light) decided to keep them secret while the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage did further research. The Catholic monastery was founded in 1774 by Brazil?s first saint, Antonio Galvao, about 50 years before the nation?s independence from colonial power Portugal.

■ NEW YORK. Headache common in people with ?GI? trouble. The prevalence of headache is higher in people with gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms such as nausea, acid reflux, diarrhea, and constipation, than in people who don?t have these bothersome symptoms, new research indicates. Both headaches and GI symptoms are common in the general population and eat up substantial healthcare dollars, note the researchers. ?However, the scientific literature about the comorbidity of headache and gastrointestinal complaints is scant,? they point out in the medical journal Cephalalgia.

■ NEW YORK. ?Ginkgo biloba? may protect memory: study. Taking the herbal supplement ginkgo biloba may help delay the onset of cognitive impairment in normal elderly adults, according to a study published online Wednesday. However, the study also showed a higher incidence of strokes and «mini-strokes» in ginkgo users. The reasons for this are unclear and require confirmation in other studies, the investigators say.

■ ARCTIC.Fossil of largest sea monster found. Scientists have claimed that a fossilised sea monster discovered on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science till date.

Nicknamed ?The Monster?, the 150 million-year-old Jurassic-era leviathan was found on Spitspergen in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard by the Norwegian scientists nearly two years back.

According to expedition team leader Jorn Hurum of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, the Svalbard specimen is about 20% larger than the previous biggest marine reptile ? a massive pliosaur from Australia.

?We have carried out a search of the literature, so we now know that we have the biggest (pliosaur). It?s not just arm-waving anymore.

?The flipper is three-metre long with very few parts missing. We have assembled all the bones in our basement and we amazed ourselves -? we had never seen it together before,? Hurum was quoted by the BBC News portal as saying.

Pliosaurs were a short-necked form of plesiosaur, a group of extinct reptiles that lived in the world?s oceans during the age of the dinosaurs. A pliosaur?s body was tear drop-shaped with two sets of powerful flippers which it used to propel itself through the water.

The scientists had to remove hundreds of tonnes of rock by hand in high winds, fog, rain, freezing temperatures and with the constant threat of attack by polar bears to excavate ?The Monster? in 2007, a year after it was discovered. The team had recovered the animal?s snout, some teeth, much of the neck and back, the shoulder girdle and a nearly complete flipper.

Subsequently, they carried out a preliminary analysis of the bones at the Natural History Museum. ?The analysis suggests this beast belongs to a previously unknown species. It?s a large one, and has the same bone structure as the previous one we found,? according to co-researcher Espen Knutsen.