1. Want to Run a Better Agency? Kill More Good Ideas

It seems counterintuitive that you could be a better leader by killing off good ideas, but it could be the best idea.

Of course killing off bad ideas makes you a better leader as well, but great leaders have to be able to tell when it is not worth the cost or effort, or user experience if the idea is too hard to execute. Any of those descriptors could make an amazing idea just awful. Steve Jobs himself is big into this principle of killing off good ideas being a hallmark of a great company. The suggested methods of tracking a company’s effectiveness:

Firstly, the amount of good ideas that are killed. The higher the amount, the more good ideas that are entering the company period. The second metric is the amount of people that are leaving the company because of the pruning of ideas. People should be complaining about their great ideas being vetoed, as frustration is an unfortunate byproduct of innovation. If someone doesn’t have enough pride and confidence to feel this byproduct, then your team isn’t motivated, whether that is a product of your workplace culture or of their own environment.

2. ‘Hidden’ species may be surprisingly common

It seems counterintuitive that we have to forget what we learned biologically about mosquitoes in the early 1900s, but since learning that the common mosquitoes we see now are not one but six different species, we can not be sure which ones past scientists were examining at the time!

Cryptic species are animals that appear identical but are actually genetically distinct. These cryptic species are a lot more common than once thought and could cause huge complications in many fields of ranging from biodiversity estimates to wildlife management, and even our understanding of diseases and how they evolve.

Updated DNA sequencing technology made way for these discoveries. These findings reportedly affect all known major branches of the animal kingdom in equal proportions and also equally in all biogeographic regions, but likely more so in tropical regions. Research on all fields’ cryptic species is ongoing but scientists are hopeful to complete work on all fish and birds in 5-10 years.

Because of these recent findings, early 1900s studies on species of mosquitos have been ruled obsolete as the species is called the ‘basic unit in biology’ and current scientists can not be sure whatsoever on the findings of these early studies.

3. KFC, Pizza Hut, and Sphinx

It seems counterintuitive that many travel across the world in order to see the ways the people of the past lived, yet there is a fully commercialized city right next to the Pyramids of Giza.

Called one of the seven wonders of the world, the Pyramids of Giza is a marvel of ancient civilization at large. Many come from all over to gaze upon the structure in its full glory, but is it really at its full glory when we have placed a fully modern town within viewing distance of the sight?

Though this is an incredible showing of the modernization of the world, the tall and mighty Pyramids of Giza, a burial place for the nobility of the ancient Egyptians, standing next to a commercialized food source of the masses.

Not only is this a mockery of the beauty of the pyramids, it is also a byproduct of the Americanization of the world at large. A user in the comment section of this post recounts how there was a Starbucks placed inside of the Forbidden City in China until the uproar surrounding it cause it to be removed.