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Levitating speakers and lightbulbs are so passé: when it comes to floating household items, this year it’s all about vegetation. Kicking off this definite new trend (which is definitely going to happen) is the Air Bonsai — a floating bonsai tree that levitates with the help of a magnetic base. The product is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, and has already raised more than $150,000 of its original $80,000 goal.

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Germans strolling down the genteel Treppenstrasse in Kassel, Germany, in late June of 1972, might have been surprised to see an unexpected addition poking out of the facade of their beloved Fridericianum. One of the world’s first independent public museums and a model of classical style and enlightened culture built in the late 18th century, the institution once employed brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the library. In 1972, it was in the midst of hosting the Documenta contemporary art show, and as part of the event, a group of experimental architects were installing a plastic orb amid the columns and stonework on the facade, a pneumatic pimple of PVC foil, 8 meters in diameter, that contained a catwalk of tubular steel. Created by…

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Have you ever wondered what the perfect Instagram would look like? Did you imagine that the key components would be pastels, Prince, bathtubs, cats, leotards, heart-shaped sunglasses, mirrors, primroses, balloons, neon lighting, Beyoncé, triangles, and tasteful nudity?

You are so correct!

Michele Bisaillon, a 28-year-old artist based in Silicon Valley, is responsible for this nearly perfect summation of modern internet aesthetics. Half nostalgia and half meme, the account is also sad, silly, and philosophical in equal doses. I imagine that these photos are what Drake’s dreams look like when he eats chocolate before bed.

When u have a lil 2 much eggnog

A video posted by Michele & Peach-O (@michel_e_b) on Dec 24, 2015 at…

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This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn are joined by Jake Kastrenakes and Racked style editor Nicola Fumo to talk about T-Pain, T-Pain’s house, and Apple’s new set of music making apps.

We’ll be live at our usual time today  — 4:30PM ET / 11:30PM PT / 8:30PM GMT. You can watch via the YouTube embed above. And if you miss the live show, you can always watch the replay (using the embed above) or download the audio version on iTunes. And speaking of iTunes, be sure to rate us five stars if you enjoyed the show. We’ll do our best to make sure you do.

We have a whole network of podcasts now! You can find them all in iTunes. They include the all new Ctrl Walt Delete podcast with Walt Mossberg and Nilay Patel, which dives…

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The latest campaign to protect the French language isn’t being waged over anglicisms like “hashtag” or “selfie,” but the design of a keyboard.

This week, the French government announced a plan to standardize the French-language computer keyboard, as part of an effort to help protect and nurture the language. The ministry of culture and communication says it’s “nearly impossible to correctly write French” on keyboards sold in the country today, meaning that the language’s strict grammatical rules are being flouted more regularly. The ministry has partnered with a standardization group to develop a new keyboard norm, which will be presented for public feedback this summer.

Unlike the QWERTY keyboards on most devices in the US and Europe,…

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Researchers describe a 10,000-year-old Kenyan massacre that led to the deaths of 12 people in a study published in Nature today. Of the bodies that were recovered, 10 show signs of violent injuries; the other two may have belonged to people who were tied up when they died. The authors of the study say the finding is the earliest scientifically dated evidence of violence between groups of ancient hunter-gatherers. But that interpretation is disputed by outside researchers, which means a dozen prehistoric skeletons have just started a scholarly fight.

One skeleton had a small blade embedded in its skull

The first skeleton that the researchers excavated was found in 2012 in Kenya, at a site named Nataruk. It was lying with its face in…

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Every advertiser wants to get under people’s skin and communicate with their basest desires. But no advertiser has ever done it quite so unnervingly as this short video from the Dutch Studio Smack. It deconstructs all of the famous branding implements used by Coca-Cola and recompiles them in a series of subtle, subversive hints reminding us of the brand. There’s the snow-white polar bear, the familiar curvaceous white lines on a crimson background, and all those delicious bubbles. It’s meant to represent a dystopian future where we might have “branded dreams,” and its most frightening aspect is that it’s actually rather gorgeous and, without ever mentioning the brand in question, conveys an overwhelmingly positive impression of it.

B…

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As a child of the ‘80s many of my memories were made with polaroid pictures — lots of instant family photos, huge grids of them pinned to the wall of my dorm room. The Polaroid of my youth stopped making film in 2008, though by then I had largely moved on to digital and medium format film photography. There are many twists and turns to the Polaroid story between then and now, but the device securely has a place in my heart. So while The Verge was in Vegas for CES I jumped at the chance to try it out, and I knew the perfect test shoot location.

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Virgin Galactic is adding a new spaceship to its fleet next month, and plans to unveil the craft at an event attended by Stephen Hawking. But before Virgin shows off the future look of its suborbital space plane, today the company revealed prototypes of some new flight suits and boots.

Instead of just pulling them off the rack, though, Richard Branson’s space company partnered up with Y-3 — an ongoing collaboration between adidas and Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. The project was led by Adam Wells, Virgin Galactic’s design head, and Y-3’s Lawrence Midwood.

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A recently unearthed woolly mammoth has rewritten the timeline for humans in the Arctic. In fact, we might’ve been there 10,000 years earlier than we once thought.

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