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For the first time in a long time, AMD has an honest-to-goodness GPU product roadmap, and it names the company's next two GPU architectures: Vega and Navi.

Revealed at this year's Game Developers Conference during the AMD "Capsaicin" event, the roadmap is light on details, but it does hint at what the future might hold for AMD's GPUs. For starters, Vega is due to arrive early in 2017, not long after the release of Polaris. Interestingly, the roadmap explicity calls out Vega's use of HBM2 memory, a feature that was originally supposed to be a part of the upcoming Polaris architecture and used alongside traditional GDDR5 memory.

In an interview with PC Perspective, AMD's Raja Koduri hinted that Polaris would instead use HBM1, rather than its more accomplished counterpart. Of particular concern is that current HBM1 implementations are limited to 4GB stacks—HBM2 can go as high as 16GB—which could carry over to Polaris. Given that GPU memory requirements have skyrocketed over the past year, that could put Polaris at a significant disadvantage, particularly when Nvidia has confirmed that at least some Pascal parts will use HBM2.

CBS and Paramount would like to use a Vulcan nerve pinch on Axanar Productions. (credit: Paramount)

Back in December, CBS and Paramount threw cold water on the grand plans of Axanar Productions, a company formed by Star Trek fans, to produce what would have been one of the most elaborate and professional-looking installments of fanfic in the Star Trek universe. Now, the Star Trek rights holders are back with an amended complaint (PDF) that lists many of the specific instances in which Axanar Productions has included something “substantially similar” to a copyrighted element in Star Trek, including races like Klingons and Vulcans, the cowl-neck uniform that Majel Barrett wore as the Enterprise’s first officer in The Original Series episode The Cage, and the concept of “Stardate."

Axanar Productions wasn’t too worried about copyright infringement when it set out to make its movies, which currently include a 20-minute prequel called Prelude to Axanar and a forthcoming feature-length film called Axanar. After all, fans had been making Star Trek fanfic for decades, and CBS had either encouraged it or turned a blind eye.

But that tacit approval stopped after Axanar Productions was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Axanar’s writer and producer, Alec Peters assured CBS and Paramount that he and others working on the project would not make any profit—all the money they raised would go directly to making Axanar.

(credit: Human Genome Project)

A crummy diet can obviously have a lasting impact on the waistline—but for parents, it may also have a lasting impact on DNA and the family line, a new study suggests.

Compared with skinny mice on a standard or low-fat diet, genetically similar mice that became obese on a high-fat, high-calorie diet were more likely to have obese offspring at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. While researchers have noted such a familial influence on metabolic disorders before, the new study took the extra steps of producing the pups by in vitro fertilization of the sperm and eggs from the obese parents, implanted in slim, surrogate mothers. This experimental setup eliminates confounding influences from mom and dad, such as chemicals in seminal fluid, molecular signals in utero, microbiome transfers, and components of breast milk.

The finding, published Monday in Nature Genetics, provides clean support for the theory that poor diet and/or obesity in parents produces epigenetic changes—chemical tags and other molecular switches of DNA that alter how the genetic code is read and translated, rather than the code itself. And those changes can get passed down to offspring and influence their metabolism and health.