The TV adaptation of the novel "Fleishman Is in Trouble" begins with the mildest and least interesting of the simultaneous midlife crises plaguing the show's three main characters. On a cloudless summer day in Manhattan, Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent divorcé, wakes up in his sparsely furnished apartment, alarmed that he is "suddenly, somehow, no longer living with Rachel," his wife of fifteen years. His angry confusion that Rachel (Claire Danes) has dropped off their preteen children at his place, in the middle of the night with little warning, briefly distracts him from his general dismay that his offspring have become products of the Upper East Side: his daughter (Meara Mahoney Gross) screeches that the clothes her mother packed for her are more suitable for the Hamptons than for camp, and even his sweetly soft son (Maxim Swinton) asks for golf lessons. Toby is overwhelmed, but he is also a wealthy, trim doctor in his early forties. A nonentity to women during his youth, he is so consumed by the endless prospects on a dating app that it takes him several days to realize that Rachel has disappeared.

When Dr. Shiran Barber-Zucker joined the lab of Prof. Sarel Fleishman as a postdoctoral fellow, she chose to pursue an environmental dream: breaking down plastic waste into useful chemicals. Nature has clever ways of decomposing tough materials: Dead trees, for example, are recycled by white-rot fungi, whose enzymes degrade wood into nutrients that return to the soil. So why not coax the same enzymes into degrading man-made waste? Barber-Zucker's problem was that these enzymes, called versatile peroxidases, are notoriously unstable. "These natural enzymes are real prima donnas; they are extremely difficult to work with," says Fleishman, of the Biomolecular Sciences Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The savvy investor keeps their eyes forward, toward the horizon. Right now, the sea of tech is the one to watch, and the ships coming into view are flying AI's flag. This is not a new development, it's been on course for several years – but as an investment sector, it's heating up. AI is the tech that will power our digital systems for years to come, everything from our smartphones to our cars to Elon Musk's Mars rockets. AI isn't just one technology, rather, it's a range of techs – and approaches to tech – including the data collection and analysis that feeds machine learning.