Dear Reader,
The big achievement this week was finally relaunching the Non-Obvious website with the full archive of 150+ past trend predictions (along with longevity ratings), book overviews, bonus downloads and everything Non-Obvious all in one place. If you have a moment, please check out the site and let me know what you think!
For stories, you'll read about the new phantom drone, why being born left or right handed might be a myth, and why using employees as paid influencers might (and should) become a trend. Plus some fun visuals from the open voting for the next design of the Euro currency.
Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!
Rohit
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This Week's New Videos ...
What If People Aren't Born Left or Right-Handed, and Just Pick One?
What if the handedness that you've assumed was in your genes was actually a learned behavior? That's the finding from a new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which aims to upend what most of us have likely believed about our dominant hand, and how much of a choice we had in which one it was.
"The dominant arm isn’t more capable because one hemisphere of the brain is simply better at controlling movement. It is because we’ve spent a lifetime practicing the specific, complicated movements that tools and handwriting demand. Take away that practice by switching to a body part like the elbow that’s never done the task before and the advantage disappears. You don't prefer your dominant hand because it's more skilled; it becomes more skilled because you prefer it."
The most fascinating part of this study is that right handedness may be passed down from parents to their kids simply because the kids observe how parents do something (like watching Dad tie his shoes) and then do it the same way themselves. Lending further evidence to this theory is the anecdotal story of famous tennis legend Rafael Nadal who is right-handed but was taught from an early age to play left handed so he could use it as an advantage. So if you learn your handedness, the next question for the researchers would pretty clearly be why someone may turn out to be left-handed despite being surrounded by righties. The research didn't seem to tackle that question yet.
Invisible Phantom Drones Are Here
I wasn't excited when I first read this week's story about the Phantom Twist, a drone that rotates so fast that it's effectively invisible to the human eye. The aircraft was developed by a team in Australia and the quick science behind it is that it "rotates up to 25 times per second, a rate that outpaces how quickly our visual system can process sharp detail." So it's not exactly invisible, but rather it "dissolves into a faint, ghostly blur that blends into whatever is behind it." The idea is a departure from most earlier efforts to make drones invisible by trying to make them blend into whatever is behind them.
Still, my unease was from the assumption that the immediate use of these sorts of drones would be surveillance related. Or maybe by the paparazzi. It turns out, there's a much more optimistic use case here:
"Drones are increasingly used to watch wildlife, check aging infrastructure, or survey wetlands, but their mere presence changes the behavior of whatever they're observing. Birds scatter, animals flee, people act differently. A drone that's hard to spot could do the same job without that side effect."
The other interesting part of the story is that the final design was built after the team used an AI computer model to generate nearly 20,000 possible drone configurations. The whirring sound of the drone, of course, is the next challenge to solve before it's truly invisible. Then we might have a new batch of problems to deal with for how people start to use it for more than just watching wildlife.
GAP Opens Influencer Programs To Their Own Employees
This story shouldn't feel revolutionary, but it still does. GAP opened up their online influencer program for their employees to become paid creators posting about Old Navy, Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Since one of the main motivations for retail workers to choose to work in one store or another is a personal affinity for the brand (and access to employee discounts), this is a natural move that every retail brand should be making. As employees are increasingly investing in their personal brands and building audiences, it's a huge, missed opportunity for so many brands to take advantage of that.
It all takes me back to my earlier days working in the digital influence group at Ogilvy fifteen years ago where a good portion of every day was spent building pitches and trying to convince brands that using their employees as spokespeople might be a great idea. I even published a trend in my first report which observed the rise of "Employees as Heroes." Clearly sometimes good ideas take a while to show up in the world.
