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Turn up the radio! TED Radio Hour’s second season begins today. Hosted by NPR’s Guy Raz, the first episode is “The Unquiet Mind,” a beautifully soundscaped hour of inspiration that will make you think differently about, well, thinking.

We’ve all had that moment when you see or hear something and wonder: am I going crazy? In this episode, TED speakers share their experiences straddling the line between madness and sanity. Neurologist Oliver Sacks explains a peculiar condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome — when people of sound mind experience lucid hallucinations. Law professor Elyn Saks shares stories about her schizophrenic episodes and how she was able to rise above her grave diagnosis. Plus, author Jon Ronson goes psychopath spotting, and wonders who among us is truly completely sane.

Check your local NPR schedule to find out when the show premieres today. Or head to iTunes where the podcast is available now »

After the death or resignation of a pope, the Sancta Sedes (Holy See) becomes vacant. Today, the Twitter account of former pope Benedict reflects this reality and has gone “Sede Vacante,” or latin for vacant seat.

As such, all of the former pope’s 39 tweets that he made since joining Twitter on December 12th, 2012 are gone. In the world of Twitter, @Pontifex hasn’t tweeted yet.

Yes, all of pope Benedict XVI’s tweets have been removed from Twitter – but they aren’t completely wiped out. The Vatican has archived all 39 on their news site and you can read all of them in nine different languages there.

The last tweet ever sent out by pope Benedict read “Thank you for your love and support. May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives.”

Reports from last week based on Vatican radio claimed that the @Pontifex account would be shuttered following Benedict’s resignation. Yesterday, we learned that that wasn’t entirely accurate. Rather than be deleted, the account will lie dormant while the Conclave selects a new pope. At that time, it’ll be up to the new pope to decide whether or not he/she wants to continue the social media outreach.

“Obviously we leave all decisions to the new man. But we would hope that he might continue to use @pontifex, which would maintain continuity,” said Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications Paul Tighe.

BlackBerry 10 smartphones will start launching in the U.S. in March, but folks in other countries have been playing around with the device for about a month now. For those consumers, RIM BlackBerry is releasing an update today that you won’t want to miss.

BlackBerry upgraded the BlackBerry 10 software to 10.0.10.85 today, and the update contains a number of enhancements that the company thinks you’re going to love. Here’s the top five enhancements coming your way:

3rd Party App Performance
We’ve improved performance for 3rd party applications, so developers can build apps that run fast and smooth for you. With this update, you might want to keep an eye out for some fresh new app launches in March, like WhatsApp.

Phone, Calendar, and Contacts
Among the top improvements and features are fixes for Gmail calendars on BlackBerry 10. You’ll also find improvements in the BlackBerry Hub for logging calls log and how conversations are handled. We’ve also made general improvements to importing contacts from online sources.

Camera
We’ve optimized the camera for better photos in low-light situations. You’ll love the difference this makes for photos where you don’t use a flash – like the Time Shift Camera feature.

Browser and Media
With more and more of you using the gorgeous screen on the BlackBerry Z10 to consume online videos and media, we’ve made a number of improvements to the software in the way the browser handles video playback to provide a fantastic experience.

Battery Life
The software team has included a number of battery life optimizations with over 60 battery saving improvements since launch to keep you moving. These combined improvements are designed so that you see improvements in battery life and heavy users especially should see a longer average usage per charge cycle.

BlackBerry says that the update should be delivered over-the-air automatically, but says you can manually check for an update as well. The schedule for update delivery is decided by the carrier with some already offering the update. Other carriers will be pushing it out as soon as possible.

A Florida sinkhole has pulled a man into a cavern that extends an estimated 100 feet across, and investigators say they haven’t found signs of life during their search for him.

Jeffrey Bush’s brother, Jeremy, says he heard an incredibly loud crash and then a scream for help. When he ran into Jeffrey’s bedroom, he found the entire room collapsed and attempted to go down to make a rescue, but ultimately had to be rescued himself.

“It swallowed his whole bedroom, his dresser — everything in his room is gone,” Jeremy said. “All I could see was the top of his bed. So I jumped in the hole and tried digging him out. I thought I could hear him screaming for me and hollering for me.”

The sinkhole was initially estimated to be about 30 feet wide, but officials say it extends at least 70 feet more beneath the surface. Bush has not been officially presumed dead, but at this point things are looking grim.

“We put engineering equipment into the sinkhole and didn’t see anything compatible with life,” Hillsborough County Fire spokeswoman Jessica Damico said.

Incredibly, the home looks normal from the street; apparently the bedroom was completely on top of the sinkhole. Neighbors on either side of the home have been evacuated, however.

The name says it all: this session  takes a look at everything that human beings do, think and know. From thoughts on what makes a civilization decline to the roots of our morality, these speakers share some of the stats and stories that point to our collective identity.

In this session:

Jared Diamond investigates why cultures prosper or decline. In his latest book, he suggests that technological civilization is only a fraction of the human narrative.

Jim Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.

Daniel Reisel searches for the psychological and physical roots of human morality.

Pulling from psychology, evolutionary theory, history and more, Daniel Ogilvie is trying to understand humankind’s deep-seated belief in the soul.

Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets — including his own.

Skylar Tibbits demonstrates self-assembly technology at TEDU. Photo: Ryan Lash

We’ve all heard of 3D printing. But what the heck is 4D printing? During TED Senior Fellow’s Skylar Tibbits’ talk at TED University on Thursday, he unveiled the concept — 3D printed objects that seamlessly continue to expand, fold and harden into different forms (see video below). The talk has gotten a lot of attention. We spoke to Skylar about the experience and asked more about what he’s up to with his newly founded MIT Self-Assembly Lab.

How are you feeling about all the attention, and why do you think there has been such a strong response from the public?

It is exciting and a bit hard to believe. This is my third Long Beach conference, and the amount of press this year has completely trumped anything that was written in the past two. I think it’s mostly due to the provocation of using the words “4D printing.” We fully believe in this technology and that it truly is 4D — meaning parts transform on their own over time. But at the end of the day, the most excitement is probably just from the name. Hopefully the technology that Stratasys developed, the demonstrations we showed and the continual development of this research will emphasize that it is truly a paradigm shift in how we think of materials and making today.

In your talk you spoke about applications for space. Can you tell us more?

We’ve recently submitted for a NASA solicitation and are hoping to continue designing and developing new methods for full reconfiguration and self-assembly of highly functional space systems. We are interested in the opposite methodology of the international space station (or space construction today), in other words, complex structures made in expensive and complex ways that come together in even more complex ways — often requiring astronaut construction and costly energy sources. How can we develop simple systems that can be shipped compactly, that then expand and become fully functional on demand while in orbit, that can be fully reconfigurable to various other highly functional systems, completely on their own and triggered by activation energies naturally found in the space environment — such as pressure, light and temperature change?

Tell us more about the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. How did it come about? What are your hopes for it in terms of research and practical application?

The lab is just starting and really an exciting time. We recently were offered space at a great place at MIT called The International Design Center, and we’re currently fundraising, grant writing and collaborating with various industry partners to kickstart the lab for the upcoming year. We are interested in developing near-term applications that can make a more adaptive and resilient environment, as well as very far-term design for the future of “making” and lifelike materials at the macro scale. Near-term projects in clued adaptable infrastructure such as piping and bridges, self-assembly for low-energy manufacturing, and passive energy construction techniques. Some of our long-term projects include developing programmable matter to be recyclable or evolvable, toolsets for a new generation of matter programmers (as distinct from computer programmers), and systems that converge natural/physical with synthetic/digital worlds.

Rovio and DreamWorks Animation today announced that they have teamed up to create a new game for mobile platforms. Rovio is best known as the creator of the Angry Birds games. The new game will be base on DreamWorks’ upcoming movie The Croods and will be released to Android and iOS platforms on March 14.

“Rovio set the industry standard in mobile gaming with Angry Birds, and we believe their massive community of active users will go wild for The Croods,” said Chris Hewish, head of Global Interactive at DreamWorks. “We’ve developed a close and collaborative relationship with Rovio in which our world class filmmakers created an incredible piece of custom animation on the home screen that introduces players to the game’s beautifully rich aesthetics.”

Judging from the previews of the movie, The Croods doesn’t appear to be the next Shrek or Kung Fu Panda, but Rovio’s skill at developing mobile games and marketing products based on them is unparalleled. The last time Rovio created a movie tie-in game was with Fox in 2011. Angry Birds Rio went on to become a mobile hit and eventually a part of the Angry Birds Trilogy.

The companies have released a trailer for the new game, which unfortunately contains no gameplay or even a hint at what type of game The Croods will be.

Kate Middleton’s brother, James, is in the headlines this week after getting a bailout from his family to the tune of $25,000 when his cake business saw a big loss.

Nice Cakes was created by James in 2011 under the parent name Nice Group London, LTD; the personalized cake company came about after the success of his 2007 startup, The Cake Kit Company. However, Nice Cakes took a big hit during its freshman debut, leaving the company with a $25,775 debt.

Middleton’s brother doesn’t seem too fazed by the loss, however, and says the company will be bigger and better than ever in 2013.

“It is not uncommon for start-up companies to make a loss in the early stages of development and it is not something I am concerned about right now,” he said. “On the contrary I am very excited as after running a pilot over 2012, Nice Cakes will be officially launching later this year with a brand new website and range of products which I am very excited about.”

Most of the Middleton family is in a similar business; parents Carole and Michael own Party Pieces, a multi-million dollar company, and sister Pippa aims to be a party planner.

Image: Andrew Crowley

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Yesterday, Kate Stone charmed the assembled TED audience with her tales of failing exams, living on a sheep farm in Australia, and developing genuinely interactive paper. Today, she shared three simple skills she’s learned along the way–and described why she thinks these are actually critical life skills.

1. Know how to dig a hole.

Stone was instructed to dig a hole for a cattle grid during her time farming sheep in the Outback of Australia. “You know how to dig a hole?” the farmer asked her. Pfft. Of course she did. Turns out, she had no idea. “He came back and just looked at how far I’d got. I thought I was doing a really good job, digging out the top soil, and working across the space that needed to be a hole.” Incorrect. Turns out, the most effective technique involves making the deepest hole possible, and then letting the surrounding earth cave in so you can shovel the earth away, nice and easy. Why is this relevant? “If you want to make change, if you want to make anything happen, you can either convince the whole world you’re right or you can affect a few people deeply,” she explains. The latter is easier. “If you’re right, they’ll tell some people who will tell more people. Focus on something deeply; let it infect everything else.”

2. Learn how to ride a motorbike.

Asked by one farmer who employed her whether she knew how to ride a motorcycle, Stone again led with a bald-faced lie. “I said I could, when I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life.” She wrote off at least four bikes on that particular farm, she confesses, though she argues that the terrain was hardly conducive to a beginner. “I swear I fell off every single day,” she says cheerfully. Sounds awful; so why is this a life skill? It’s all about your focus. “I have a distinct image of going down this little hill, I’d see a rock in the road and I’d think ‘I’m going to hit it! I’m going to hit it!’” she laughs. Invariably, she’d hit the rock and fall. But one time, she saw two rocks and couldn’t figure out which one to look at, so she stared at the gap. Herein lies the lesson. “Where you look is where you go. If you only see the way forward, you don’t see the obstacles. If all you look at is the obstacles, you’ll fall off.”

3. Figure out how to pour from a barrel of oil.

“With big oil cans, the holes are at the side on the top,” Stone describes. “The intuitive way to pour from it is to pour with the hole at the bottom.” But then the air can’t get in, so you invariably end up with a big mess. The first time she did this, her farmer boss asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. “Twist the barrel around, have the hole at the top so air can go in the top half and oil can come out the bottom half and you pour it out nice and easy. It made me realize that, quite often, the way you do something appears to be counterintuitive. Doing things the way you think you should do them is often the worst way possible.”

Has the Chromebook Pixel convinced you to finally pick up one of Google’s Web centric laptops? If so, you might want to jump onto the Chrome OS beta channel to get the latest features before anybody else.

The latest Chrome OS beta contains a number of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Here’s the full list: