When Silicon Valley came back this season, viewers may not have known what to expect, but they certainly knew what not to expect. T.J. Miller's much-ballyhooed exit meant that the show would be without its most dependable (if incompetent) trickster. Since the HBO show's inception, Erlich Bachman had been the perfect agent of chaos: shortsighted, greedy, and insecure enough to constantly undercut the Pied Piper gang without being an actual antagonist. Couple his departure that with the show's increasingly how are they gonna get out of this--oh, they just did narrative curlicues, and even fans would have been forgiven for assuming the worst for Season 5. Is that how the newest batch turned out? The season, which wrapped up last night, felt as ripped-from-the-headlines as other years--this time cryptocurrency flameouts, Tesla, and Sophia the robot got the parody treatment--but it also added some new variables to the mix.

Silicon Valley is Mike Judge and Alec Berg's biting comedy about the American tech industry, now in its fourth season. Every week, we'll be taking one idea, scene, or joke and explain how it ties to the real Silicon Valley and speaks to an issue at the heart of the industry and its ever-lasting goal to change the world -- and make boatloads of money in the process. In the fictional tech industry of HBO's Silicon Valley, the soul-crushing mundanity of grunt work is often treated as a punchline. Like many sitcoms about careerism and the slog of American professional life, it's considered an insult to have to do boring, seemingly meaningless tasks just because some higher power demands it. But on last night's episode, Silicon Valley highlighted a rather pernicious aspect of the tech industry that's currently serving as the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, shining a spotlight on a type of human labor often overlooked when we discuss the marvels of automation.

March 2, 2017 --Computer engineers have created some amazingly small devices, capable of storing entire libraries of music and movies in the palm of your hand. But geneticists say Mother Nature can do even better. DNA, where all of biology's information is stored, is incredibly dense. The whole genome of an organism fits into a cell that is invisible to the naked eye. That's why computer scientists are turning to molecular biology to design the next best way to store humanity's ever-increasing collection of digital data.

March 2, 2017 --Computer engineers have created some amazingly small devices, capable of storing entire libraries of music and movies in the palm of your hand. But geneticists say Mother Nature can do even better. DNA, where all of biology's information is stored, is incredibly dense. The whole genome of an organism fits into a cell that is invisible to the naked eye. That's why computer scientists are turning to microbiology to design the next best way to store humanity's ever-increasing collection of digital data.

March 2, 2017 --Computer engineers have created some amazingly small devices, capable of storing entire libraries of music and movies in the palm of your hand. But geneticists say Mother Nature can do even better. DNA, where all of biology's information is stored, is incredibly dense. The whole genome of an organism fits into a cell that is invisible to the naked eye. That's why computer scientists are turning to microbiology to design the next best way to store humanity's ever-increasing collection of digital data.

Columnist Ed Baig reviews Pixel, which features the high-IQ Google Assistant and a competitive, high-end smartphone camera. Guests inspect the new Pixel phone by Google after it was introduced at a Google product event in San Francisco, Calif., Oct 4, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO -- When Google's new smartphone goes on sale this week, no one is expecting an iPhone-like hit -- at least not right away. Despite a splashy launch and a "Made by Google" marketing campaign, not to mention some positive reviews, the Pixel is still taking on the likes of the wildly popular iPhone. Samsung's recent spate of troubles may boost Pixel sales with defecting Note and Galaxy owners, but not enough to make a serious dent in the high-end smartphone market, analysts say.