Dung beetles aim for the stars Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. A good motto not just for pop music count-down shows but also, it turns out, for dung beetles. Post to FacebookPosted!A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Sent!A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A report published online in 'Current Biology' shows that even on the darkest of nights, African ball-rolling insects are guided by the soft glow of the Milky Way.(Photo: Current Biology, Dacke et al.)Story HighlightsDung beetles navigate by starlightThe observation is a first for insectsResearchers ran planetarium tests to check the findingKeep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, as radio personality Casey Kasem always said. A good motto not just for pop-music count-down shows but also, it turns out, for dung beetles.Biologists report that the lowly bugs, best known for rolling, burying and dining on dung, may share a navigational trick known until now only among birds, seals and people. In the Current Biology journal, a team led by Marie Dacke of Sweden's Lund University, report that dung beetles[1] follow straight paths on starry nights, but lose their way on overcast evenings.""Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths," said Dacke, in a statement. The key to the dung beetle's navigation seems to be the Milky Way, the white splash of stars across the night sky that marks the center-line of our galaxy. Galaxies are vast circular and spiral shaped collections of stars, hundreds of billions of them in the Milky Way, scattered throughout the cosmos.The researchers wired up dung beetles in an arena inside a planetarium to determine how and whether the insects oriented themselves to the stars. "This…

Bethesda opens beta signups for 'Elder Scrolls' MMO The massively multiplayer online game launches on PCs and Macs later this year. Post to FacebookPosted!A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Sent!A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A scene from 'The Elder Scrolls Online.'(Photo: Bethesda Softworks)Video game players are inching closer to their first taste of Bethesda Softworks' upcoming massively multiplayer online (MMO) game based on The Elder Scrolls.The publisher is accepting signups starting Tuesday for a future beta test version of the game, which launches later this year. The availability of the beta will be revealed at a later date."We're really excited to get the game into players' hands," said Matt Firor, game director of The Elder Scrolls Online, in a statement. "We receive invaluable feedback through the beta process, and that helps us ensure that the game will be one of the best online gaming experiences ever offered."This is the first time The Elder Scrolls has dipped into the world of MMOs. Previous entries, such as 2011's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, have released as offline role-playing games.The game is expected to share several gameplay elements of previous Elder Scrolls titles, most notably its treatment of combat. Firor says the MMO will also feature a stronger social component by removing servers or shards."We wanted to bring more of the modern social networking, Facebook-era concepts ... into ESO," he says. "The first thing you do is remove barriers between people. We wanted to go shardless ... and make everyone able to interact with potentially everyone else in the game."Check out the video posted below for more on The Elder Scrolls Online. { "assetid": "1854619", "aws": "tech/videogames", "aws_id": "tech_videogames", "blogname": "", "contenttype": "story pages ", "seotitle": "Beta-signups-elder-scrolls-mmo", "seotitletag": "Bethesda opens beta signups…

Microsoft's Surface Windows 8 Pro.(Photo: Microsoft)Story HighlightsPrices start at $899To be sold at Best Buy, Staples and Microsoft retail stores64GB, 128GB configurations; can function as tablet or laptopThere was plenty of enthused anticipation — and not a small amount of confusion too — when Microsoft brought out its Surface tablet computer last October. The slim and light touch-friendly tablet was the very first personal computer that Microsoft built itself, and was an early showcase for Windows 8. That initial Surface actually ran a variant of Windows 8 software known as Windows RT, and included specialized but complete versions of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote), as well as some other integrated apps. But it was generally light on third party apps. And chief among its drawbacks was the fact that Surface RT was incompatible with all the programs that are on your older Windows computers, a turnoff for some folks who might have been otherwise inclined to buy what is in many respects an impressive piece of engineering. Such people were counseled instead to wait about three months for the full Windows 8 version of the machine.They won't have to wait much longer. Microsoft has just announced that Surface Windows 8 Pro, as it's being called, will be available in the U.S. and Canada on Feb. 9, at a starting price of $899. Surface RT, by contrast, starts at $499. The new Surface will be sold through all Microsoft retail stores, microsoftstore.com[1], Staples and Best Buy, and made available in 64GB and 128GB configurations. It will include a pen you can draw or jot notes with, and function either as a tablet or a laptop. It houses an Intel Core i5 processor.Microsoft designed Windows 8 so it works on what we think of as traditional PCs as well as tablets.…