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How the heck OK Go made this fantastic zero-gravity music video.

The band OK Go is out with a new music video, and if you haven't seen it, it's amazing.

Yes, that is two flight attendants spiraling through the air. GIF from OK Go/Facebook.

They're in zero-G! They're not on a green screen and this most definitely isn't CGI. They really did choreograph an entire routine — complete with flying laptops, acrobatic flight attendants, and a storm of colored floating balls — all set to a remarkably catchy song.


But OK Go definitely didn't go to space for this.

OK Go is known for doing some crazy stuff in their videos, like dancing on treadmills or constructing a musical car obstacle course, but even they don't have the wherewithal to blast into space. Instead, their latest video all takes place on a special airplane from S7 airlines in Russia that can simulate zero gravity.

A similar plane in Germany. Image from borsi112/Wikimedia Commons.

How it works: The plane flies in long arcs up and down. At the very top, right as it stops going up and is just starting to fall back down, the passengers can experience what it's like to be in space. It's like how a pop-fly in baseball will sometimes appear to hang in the air for just a second before falling back to Earth.

A lot of people have used this technique before.

In fact, you may have seen it before and not even realized it.

It's been used in movies, such as the weightlessness scenes in "Apollo 13."

GIF from "Apollo 13."

But it has applications beyond the silver screen as well. It's been used to train astronauts, for one thing.

And in 2007, physicist Stephen Hawking got to go for a ride as well!

But the secret behind this production is more than just a special plane. It also took a little video magic.

Here's the rub about making a three-minute video on this plane. Each bout of zero-G only lasts about 20 seconds. After that, the plane needs about five minutes to reset.

And, fun fact, that weight they lose at the top of the arc comes back with a vengeance afterward. Any passengers on the plane will be plastered into their chairs for a few seconds.

So while they were able to film the entire thing in one continuous shot — by pausing their actions for the non-weightless periods and snipping that out of the video — the actual trip took about 45 minutes! You can read more about how they found those amazing flight attendants, how many people it took to do this (a lot), and how many times the crew experienced stomach troubles from the constant up and down (also a lot) on the video's FAQ page.

Or you can just go ahead and indulge in the catchy, pastel awesomeness of OK Go:

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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