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According to the Department of Energy, this is an exploded waste drum in the dump. "Damage can be seen to the slip sheet on top of the waste container and there are remnants of a magnesium oxide bag also visible." (credit: Department of Energy )

The Los Angeles Times is estimating that an explosion that occurred at a New Mexico nuclear waste dumping facility in 2014 could cost upwards of $2 billion to clean up.

Construction began on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico's Carlsbad desert in the 1980s (PDF). The site was built to handle transuranic waste from the US' nuclear weapons program. The WIPP had been eyed to receive nuclear waste from commercial, power-generating plants as well.

According to the LA Times, the 2014 explosion at the WIPP was downplayed by the federal government, with the Department of Energy (DoE) putting out statements indicating that cleanup was progressing quickly. Indeed, a 2015 Recovery Plan insisted that "limited waste disposal operations" would resume in the first quarter of 2016. Instead, two years have passed since the incident without any indication that smaller nuclear waste cleanup programs around the US will be able to deliver their waste to the New Mexico facility any time soon.

Enlarge / The HPU's floorplan. (credit: Microsoft)

Since it was first unveiled, we've learned bits and pieces about the hardware inside Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality headset. But Microsoft's custom Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) has always posed something of a mystery. At Hot Chips this week, the company finally shed a little light on what its special chip is doing.

Ever since we first used HoloLens, we knew that it had some special hardware. Our first units weren't the sleek all-in-one devices that are now available to developers and corporations for $3,000. Instead, each of our devices had a bulky chest-mounted unit that contained an FPGA (a kind of chip that can be rewired on-the-fly to change its behavior), fans to keep it cool, and an umbilical cord to provide power.

That FPGA was the precursor to the HPU that the HoloLens headsets now contain. The HPU integrates data from the HoloLens's sensors (accelerometers to detect motion and a Kinect-like camera system to detect depth). The chip uses those sensors to recognize gestures, maintain a map of the environment, and ensure that virtual 3D objects retain their position in the real world.

Thanks to some serious legal gymnastics, the video game makers at Rare have been able to re-release a lot of older software they made for other companies. That includes a ton of the games made while the company was part of the Nintendo "second-party" family in the '90s. The exceptions have been held back due to legal clearance issues and copyrighted characters, and none seems more legally thorny than the legendary GoldenEye 007. Companies like Nintendo, Activision, and MGM all have legal claims to this movie-gaming mess of licensing.

Those legal issues didn't stop a team of Rare developers from remastering the 1997 N64 classic from the ground up and prepping it for launch on the Xbox 360. The existence of this unreleased remake has been proven out by leaked image and video snippets over the years, but we've never seen anything quite like Tuesday's megadump of information: a full 30 minutes of GoldenEye 007 running on debug Xbox 360 hardware.

The footage, captured and posted by gaming history site Rare Thief, contains both campaign and multiplayer gameplay. This Xbox 360 version appears to retain most of the original's aspects, including level design, mission structure, sound effects, and low-poly geometry. The "remastered" aspect comes primarily from wholly redrawn textures and added graphical flair, such as better-looking skyboxes and extra bits of geometry. The video shows an on-the-fly graphics toggle that lets players switch between N64 graphics and redrawn graphics at any time to really see the difference; this function also appeared in both recent Halo game remasters. The other obvious improvement: a silky smooth 60 frames-per-second visual refresh that far exceeds the original game's 20 FPS in campaign mode (and even lower performance in split-screen).

Enlarge / You have been served: a subpoena cover letter sent to the service provider for Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server yesterday by Rep. Lamar Smith.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, has sent subpoenas to three companies that provided services related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server. The subpoena seeks information on how secure the server was and whether it was protected within the guidelines set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for systems used by government employees. Smith's subpoenas were supported by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The subpoenas were sent to executives of the data security firm Datto, SECNAP Network Security, and the ISP and managed services provider Platte River Networks. Datto's SIRIS disaster recovery service was used to back up the e-mail server hosting ClintonEmail.com, and SECNAP provided its Cloudjacket managed intrusion detection and prevention service to the Clinton server. Platte River Networks apparently managed the server for at least part of the period that Clinton and her staff used e-mail accounts on it while at the State Department. All three companies had previously declined to provide information to Smith's committee voluntarily.

In the letter accompanying the subpoena to Platte River Networks CEO Treve Suazo, Smith and Johnson wrote: