Easter Island has little to do with Easter—but new research shows it did once have a very impressive egg hunt.

More than a thousand years ago, Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of ocean to reach one of the most remote islands on the planet. They called it Rapa Nui and built a community there.

Three hundred years ago, a Dutch captain arrived on Easter day and gave the island its Western name.

Little did he know that, for centuries, the Rapa Nuans had worshipped migrating birds for their freedom to fly away to distant lands—and had practiced an important and sometimes deadly ceremony each year, upon the arrival of the sooty terns.

Young, fit Rapa Nuans would swim the shark-infested waters to Motu Nui, a rocky islet where the terns nested, to harvest an egg. They’d put it in a special headband carrier, then swim the watery gauntlet back to Rapa Nui, where they would climb a thousand-foot sea cliff, careful with every foot- and handhold not to break the egg.

The first egg hunter to arrive at the top, with his prize intact, would present it to an important elder in his village, who would be crowned Tangata-Manu, the bird man. His tribe would rule Rapa Nui for the next year.

Later, upon the bird man’s death, the islanders would carve a moai, one of their famous mega-statues, in his image.

This makes our Easter egg hunts look, well, like child’s play.

Spring is tornado season, so let’s take a look at a few twister myths and how the truth about them can keep you safe.

The first myth is that spring is tornado season! While it’s true more than half of those in the Northern Hemisphere do occur in April and May, they can occur in any month of the year.

It’s also a myth that tornadoes never strike the same place twice. Some places have had three in one day. Others have had one on the same day in three consecutive years.

It’s a myth that tornadoes won’t cross bodies of water or form in mountains or cities. While that’s less likely, they’ve hit several urban areas in the southern U.S. and jumped over the Mississippi River.

It’s a myth that you can outdrive a tornado in your car. Tornadoes can travel 60 miles an hour or more and move unpredictably. Your car could be picked up by one of them.

Parking under a bridge or overpass could actually be more dangerous because those structures can channel and intensify the wind and debris.

If a tornado is coming toward your car, the safest thing to do is get out, move away and find shelter in a ditch, or lying face down in a flat field.

Another myth is that air pressure will explode a house’s windows outward. It’s actually flying debris carried by the wind that’s the most dangerous part of a twister—and that’s what breaks windows.

So don’t worry about opening them; that’s precious time you could use taking shelter.

You can find more tips to stay safe during a tornado on EarthDate.

Some paleontologists have recently put forth a controversial idea—that they’ve found a place where the time of year the dinosaurs died is captured precisely in the fossil record.

It’s called Tanis, in North Dakota. But it was once the northern end of an inland sea.

66 million years ago, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula, it instantly wiped out all life within 1,000 miles. But Tanis is nearly 2,000 miles away—what happened here?

Glass spherules, made of quartz, rained down from the heated atmosphere.

Shock waves from the huge earthquake caused by the asteroid sloshed the inland sea, in waves up to 30 feet high.

Fish died with spherules caught in their gills. Schools of them were found preserved in rocks, with open mouths suggesting death by suffocation.

Their bony plates show they had just begun the rapid growth of spring but had not reached the maximum growth of summer.

Other animals and plants were buried upright, frozen in place, not flattened like typical fossils.

If the scientists are right, this pegs the asteroid impact to a spring day in the Northern Hemisphere, which would have made its animals and plants more vulnerable than those in the Southern Hemisphere, where they could have already begun winter hibernation.

More fascinating clues in our quest to understand the event that made way for mammals, like us, to inhabit the Earth.

For more than 20,000 years, humans have used poison—in hunting, in pest and plant control, and even to kill other humans.

Castor bean residue is the source for ricin, which causes multiple organ failure. But it’s used by some indigenous tribes on their hunting arrows.

But the deadliest synthetic poison is VX, a nerve agent that stops victims' breathing. Originally developed as an insecticide, it proved too lethal for that. One gram could kill 2,500 people.

Another profoundly lethal poison is the radioactive isotope of polonium, famously used to assassinate a Russian dissident in 2006. One gram could kill 10 million people.

The most deadly one, surprisingly, is used routinely. Extremely tiny quantities of botulinum toxin, produced by bacteria, are used to paralyze facial muscles to reduce wrinkles. But just one gram could kill one billion people!

All these may be deadly, but the riskiest poisons are the ones found at home—cabinets full of pesticides, cleaning solutions and medications.

There’s one poisoning reported in the U.S. every eight seconds, and 90 percent of them occur in households.

Little kids tend to put things in their mouths, so they’re the most vulnerable. Nearly 4 percent of children below six will have a poison exposure.

A good reason to put child locks on cabinets that contain potentially poisonous household chemicals.

Heavy farm equipment is now as heavy as the heaviest dinosaurs—and, surprisingly, there may be some similarities.

Today, a fully loaded combine weighs 60,000 pounds—or more!

Engineers have worked to distribute their increasing weight across the soil, widening the tires, sometimes putting three tires on each hub.

But research has shown these heavier machines compact not just the tilled topsoil but soil far beneath it, into the root zones of crops.

This heavy compaction can destroy soil structure: the pores of air space, fungi, insects, earthworms, and beneficial microbes that are essential to soil health and thriving plants. And this damage can persist for decades.

Likewise, the heaviest dinosaurs, tromping through vegetated areas for millions of years, must have compacted those soils, hampering growth of the food they depended on.

Scientists think their long necks may have been an adaptation to help them stay on established pathways and reach into untouched vegetation—much like elephants do today.

We may never know, but modern farmers are looking for machinery solutions that don’t compact the soil as much. They probably won’t have long necks—but they probably will stick to defined paths.

The most likely solution may be fleets of small robotic tractors, controlled remotely by one operator or autonomously, keeping to set patterns.

The farms of the future, informed by the giants of the past.

Lobsters used to be considered the “cockroach of the sea,” food fit only for indentured servants and prisoners. My, how times have changed.

Could the same change be coming for crickets?

Today, nearly 40 percent of habitable land is used to raise livestock and their feed.

By 2050, the UN projects global population will increase by two billion people—people who will need protein in their diet. There may not be enough real estate to produce today’s livestock for them.

For the same amount of protein, farming insects requires 5 times less feed, 15 times less land and 50 times less water than beef—and produces 80 times less methane!

Insects grow quickly, in days instead of months or years, produce huge numbers of offspring, and can be farmed vertically, like produce.

In fact, raising insects may have less environmental impact than many crops!

They can be fed organic waste. And their waste can then be used as fertilizer.

And they’re good for you. Insects are rich in amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Flour made from ground crickets has more iron than spinach and more calcium than milk.

The UN has catalogued 1,900 species of edible insects—and there are already two billion people who eat them: dried grasshoppers in Mexico, fried grubs in Africa, and roasted insects of all kinds in Asia.

Once we get a taste for them, they may wriggle their way into many more diets.

You may have seen, years ago, commercials for cubic zirconia—a synthetic diamond substitute —and been unimpressed.

But naturally occurring zircon crystals, made from zirconium silicate, are another story.

Zircon crystals are extremely durable, resistant to melting, cracking, dissolving, or crushing, and able to withstand repeated cycles of metamorphism and erosion.

This makes them the longest lasting—and oldest—minerals on Earth.

If that’s not impressive enough, they also have a natural clock within them.

Uranium atoms have the same charge as zirconium atoms so they’re able to sneak into zircon crystals in trace amounts.

The uranium decays radioactively into lead over time, and the ratio of uranium to lead in a zircon crystal can precisely tell its age.

Recently scientists found tiny zircon crystals from western Australia that were 4.38 billion years old.

Bear in mind that Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, so these crystals hold important clues to its beginning.

Analysis of oxygen isotopes within the crystals revealed they formed in a water-rich magma. Traces of titanium point to cooling at temperatures found in plate boundary subduction zones.

These findings suggest that Earth had more water—and active plate tectonics—hundreds of millions of years earlier than currently thought.

All that from a tiny, but very impressive, crystal.

Dung beetles. Scientists think they evolved 150 million years ago, along with flowering plants, which had become the main food of herbivorous dinosaurs.

Much of the plant matter passed through the dinosaurs’ guts, producing huge volumes of poop with some nutritive value—for a new kind of beetle to capitalize on.

Today, there are 8,000 species completely dependent on dung. They eat it, make homes of it, and lay their eggs in it so their hatchlings will have food.

Some species live in the dung. Others tunnel under it, to pull it into their burrows. The most famous make big balls of it and roll them away for safe keeping.

But first, they climb on top of the ball and do a little dance. Scientists think they’re taking a “photo” of the sky to orient themselves.

They then push the ball off at top speed, to avoid it being stolen by another hungry dung beetle.

If they get knocked off course, they climb back on the ball, reorient themselves to the sky, and carry on.

They can orient to the sun, the moon, and when there are neither of these, even the Milky Way.

Researchers have even put dung beetles in planetariums, and they’ve navigated just fine to the projected galaxy.

But when they blindfolded the beetles, they couldn’t orient at all and just pushed their dung balls around in circles.

Dung beetles’ chosen food, and their single-minded dedication to it, may seem funny to us. But like other nocturnal animals, from frogs to seals, they are amazing animal astronomers.