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ICYMI: Bullet-stopping foam, all-terrain military car and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-659024{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-659024, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-659024{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-659024").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Researchers developed a new kind of armor called composite metal foam that's stronger and lighter than the metals inside of it. DARPA is developing a military vehicle that should be able to travel over 95% of solid surfaces, and a Kickstarter project to explore the depths of the Yellowstone River has our attention, in light of the coral reef discovery outside of the Amazon River. Make sure you send this video to your diehard Apple watch friend. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
UMaine's clean snowmobile runs on (a lot of) natural gas
Take a look at what these mechanical engineering students from the University of Maine say is the only natural gas-powered snowmobile in the US. Why make all these changes to what used to be a stock Arctic Cat XF1100? To compete in the Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge, which was founded to create machines capable of running in Yellowstone Natural Park where rules about noise and emissions keep gas snowmobiles out. Changing the fuel source from gasoline to natural gas not only meant swapping out the gas tank, but also the injectors inside the motor. As you can see in the video after the break, last year's team got the beast running, but this year students are working on improving the handling and tuning.
Nokia Drive offline navigation review: taking the Lumia 900 for an off-the-grid spin
I've sung praises about it for years, but it seems like only now the industry is getting on the same train of thought. It could be my unnatural adoration of travel, or just an entirely healthy fear of getting lost, but offline navigation has long since been a top priority for me when choosing a mobile device. Or, more importantly, a mobile operating system. For the longest while, iOS forced my hand to Android due to Google Maps Navigation being available only on the latter, and while even that wasn't offline, it still far surpassed any other routing app in terms of system integration, map updates and general silkiness. Even dating back to our 2010 mobile GPS shootout, Nokia has been a player. At that time, it was the outfit's Ovi Maps leading the pack, offering the only legitimate offline solution amongst a legion of ho-hum alternatives that required bits of data to keep you on track. But frankly, there wasn't a Symbian device in Nokia's stable that could show up my Nexus One in terms of overall utility, so begrudgingly, I pushed it aside. Eventually, Google came around and added caching to routes, which effectively downloaded all routing guidance along your path as soon as you plugged in a destination. The killer, however, was that it wouldn't take too kindly to veering far from that path should you ever drop signal. Close, but no cigar. Fast forward to today, and we've got Google Maps already working in offline mode for Android 2.2+ devices. Furthermore, the company's Brian McClendon confessed to us at its June 2012 'Maps' event that it's "committed" to bringing all of the app's features to iOS (and potentially other platforms). But in my haste to find something in the here and now, I recently turned to the Lumia 900 for guidance. Literally. Back in late March, the Lumia-exclusive Nokia Drive application gained full offline access, and I sought to use the handset exclusively to navigate a 1,900-mile trek through some of America's most remote locales. How'd it go? Join us after the break to find out. %Gallery-159721%
National Parks Street View-style trails goes live, avoids the Google cars (video)
After tooling up a team of hikers with an impressive camera tripod and unleashing them on the likes of the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park, Nature Valley has published its fully rotational Trail Views online. You'll be able to effortlessly follow several routes across the great American countryside and for those too lazy to even click the forward arrow, there's an autoplay mode. Three different locations -- with multiple trails -- are online now and you can check out how the granola-grinding company captured it all right after the break.
New developer Q&A looks at the next stage of WAR
Some things in life are so regular as to be dependable: the eruption of Old Faithful at Yellowstone, the frenzy of Black Friday shopping, and a Mythic developer Q&A Ventrilo session when a new patch goes up on the test server. Following a similar Q&A session from a week ago, Mythic devs returned to chew the fat with Warhammer Online players about anything and everything under the virtual sun. Mythic's Carrie Gouskos, Nate Levy and Mike Wyatt fielded a large range of questions, from class balancing to destructive environments. A lot of focus was given to the upcoming 1.4.X patch, the next major step for the game. Mythic was coy about topics like player housing and improved crafting, offering up a "no comment" when the devs were asked about them. One player wondered if fortress sieges would ever return, to which Mike replied: "Hopefully, at some point. There's a lot of problems with how we would like to implement it, usually with population density and the server not being able to handle the load. So we're looking at ways to bring them back in some fashion, at some point." The full transcript is available at Gaarawarr Gabs.
