That other idea I never got around to: probably horribly pretentious or something. But I thought it was interesting, I hope, so here goes. It seems like most of the time we intuitively consider history synchronically, that is, as one whole wherein everything has pretty much equal value and we can pick and choose what to look at. The advantage of this is kind of like when one is writing a paper or creating a painting or sculpture &c, as one can think about it synchronically and put it synthesize it into a coherent piece more effectively. But I think it would do well to put some effort into considering history diachronically as much as possible - like a dialogue or narrative, where the value of each part depends on its context within the other parts. For example, a recent incident inspired the news to remark upon the massacre of Christians by Muslims in Turkey in the not-so-recent past; but not-so-much-further-back than that, the massacre in that area was going the exact opposite way, a context the talking head left out.

'Extinct' Woodpecker Flies Back from the Beyond - you know those have got to be undead woodpeckers

Too Cold for Comfort - my random incredibly-nonsensical idea: running off of "In and near the Milky Way, attraction wins, but beyond a certain distance, repulsion does," if one could get to the area where repulsion wins it would be awesome if it somehow helped travel between galaxies by pushing objects away from the departed region (I also want that little map they have near the top)

Tech-telepathy? - creepy...though it would be interesting to try to tie it into the pseudo-telepathy in Peter Watts' novels