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What we have here are two scenarios ostensibly about Easter Island's past, but really about what might be our planet's future. The first scenario — an ecological collapse — nobody wants that. But let's think about this new alternative — where humans degrade their environment but somehow "muddle through." Is that better? In some ways, I think this "success" story is just as scary. The Danger Of 'Success' What if the planet's ecosystem, as J.B. MacKinnon puts it, "is reduced to a ruin, yet its people endure, worshipping their gods and coveting status objects while surviving on some futuristic equivalent of the Easter Islanders' rat meat and rock gardens?"

As much of the world struggles to contain new waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, Taiwan just marked its 200th consecutive day without a locally transmitted case of the disease.

Taipei's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been one of the world's most effective. The island of 23 million people last reported a locally transmitted case on April 12, which was Easter Sunday. As of Thursday, it had confirmed 553 cases -- only 55 of which were local transmissions. Seven deaths have been recorded.

Easter was an important milestone in the United States because President Donald Trump had said a month earlier he wanted the country "opened up and just raring to go" by the holiday.

tartar is very durable. Just ask these Neanderthals, whose 40,000-year-old tartar scientists recently analyzed to figure out the real paleo diet. Tartar grows in layers—almost like tree rings—entombing DNA from tiny bits of food as well as bacteria in the mouth. Forty thousand years later, scientists can analyze that DNA to reconstruct what was going on in the mouths of long-dead Neanderthals.

Having traveled so far back in time using ancient tartar, some of the same scientists have embarked on a more ambitious project: using the DNA from the bacteria in tartar to figure out how humans settled the 10 million square miles of Polynesia.

Humans first reached the Society Islands, in the center of the Polynesian Triangle, perhaps around 1,000 AD. Then in the span of just a couple hundred years, they took canoes across vast tracts of open ocean to find specks of inhabitable rock as far-flung as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. How Polynesians navigated these waters in the 11th century is a subject of considerable fascination. But even more basically, archaeologists are not sure exactly when the islands were settled and in what order. That’s where the tartar comes in.

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.

Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States

We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans

We are all still in this together. But some of us are now falling so much deeper into it than others.

No wonder some were furious, then, when it emerged that Prince Charles had been tested despite suffering from what’s said to be only a mild case of coronavirus. Buckingham Palace insists it was done for sound clinical reasons, and even if it wasn’t, one princely test makes no practical difference to the ability of hundreds of thousands of key workers to get one.

Houses that normally sit shuttered and forlorn until Easter started opening up again the minute the schools shut – and so many people have been trying to book hideaway cottages on remote Scottish islands that ferry crossings are being restricted. Tiny communities with no cases of their own are understandably afraid of what wealthy urban refugees may bring with them, and fear curdles all too easily into resentment.

Chile has created a new law protecting the waters along its 6,400km (4,000 mile) coastline.

The new legislation will increase the area of sea under Chilean state protection from 4.3% to 42.4 %, and protect marine life in around 1.4 million square kilometres of sea.

In September last year, Chile opened a huge marine park around Easter Island, which is home to species only found there.