Railguns have some serious power and while we are used to seeing them in the movies, the government is always busy testing out new ways to use them. The U.S. Navy just fired a metal projectile that destroyed a target a hundred miles away.

The railgun’s operation is pretty straightforward. It uses an electrical charge measured in megajoules as a propellant, which allows the large ordnance to be fired and detonated quickly. The recent test struck the distant target in a matter of minutes.

According to Apple, the latest 32/64GB iPod touch is 50% faster than the old iPod touch. It’s an impressive claim. But is it accurate? Well, Macworld tested it out so you don’t have to worry about it. They found that the new touch comes close to that benchmark, even though it fell a tad short in some testing.

Booting: The old touch took 31 seconds. The new touch takes 19 seconds. Loading a web page went from 34 seconds to 15. And most games tested between loading 33% and 50% faster.

Don’t believe that the Sonim/Land Rover S1 phone is the toughest phone? Well, it can stand up to being stomped on by an elephant and it survives being run over by an actual Land Rover as well as getting thrown out of a second floor window.

Oh and it also survived being dunked in mud, cooked in a 300 degree oven, and soaked in beer. After all of that, it was a three ton forklift that finally killed it.

Genetic testing isn’t something you can do in a few minutes. It’s an involved process, requiring special chemicals and instruments that aren’t commonplace everywhere. But now some scientists at Berkeley have created a technique that uses electrostatic tech instead, which simplifies everything.

The DNA is prepared in a lab first and put on a microarray. Negatively charged microspheres are spread across the surface, which push themselves into clumps as they move away from the like-charged DNA areas. It’s an easier and simpler way as well as less costly than current techniques we use now. Apparently the resulting clumps are large enough to be recorded by simple imaging devices like your cellphone camera. It means that in the near future DNA testing could be super quick and accessible.