• Serena Williams is returning to tennis at age 44, with her first pro match the week of June 8.
• Williams has been open about using a GLP-1 to lose weight, saying it helps her move better.
• Her comeback is great news for people who believe in peptides for longevity and performance.

The GOAT is bounding out of retirement.

Tennis great Serena Williams is back in the game, after openly endorsing GLP-1s for weight loss, and emphasizing how great her knees feel at her new, lower weight.

"I'm moving better on Ro," she said in a Super Bowl ad for Ro, a telehealth company that prescribes Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. (Williams' husband, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, sits on the board and is a major investor.)

In the commercial, Williams said she can move more easily and enjoy steadier blood sugar levels throughout the day while she trains. In general, she feels "healthier" on her injectable medication, which she's said helped her lose 34 pounds after the birth of her second child in 2023.

"After having two kids, I wasn't able to be at a weight that was healthy for me," Williams told the "Today" show when she first announced her paid partnership with Ro in 2025.

Her comeback is huge for tennis, of course — but also for the burgeoning peptide movement.

Yes, GLP-1s ("glucagon-like peptide-1") are peptides.

For the uninitiated, injectable peptides are hot stuff right now. They have become wildly popular among gym-goers, athletes, and bodybuilders looking to trim fat, control inflammation, and avoid injuries. Ultimately, they want to find an edge in their routine.

Peptides are critical signaling molecules our bodies use to build muscle, heal injuries, and control hormones. Gym bros' favorite peptides include BPC-157 (aka "the Wolverine shot") for recovery, ipamorelin CJC-1295 for lean muscle growth — and, of course, GLP-1s for weight loss.

To be clear, Williams isn't suggesting that GLP-1s should be used as performance-enhancing drugs. She is simply emblematic of a growing trend, from regular folks on up to competitive bodybuilders and elite athletes, who are using GLP-1s to stay nimble as they get older.

Her experience mirrors what many doctors are seeing in clinical practice: Their patients are recognizing GLP-1s as a health optimization tool — seeing that the fat reduction and anti-inflammatory benefits of these drugs go beyond treating diabetes and obesity. Research shows the medications can improve heart health, liver function, and sleep quality. And scientists are also probing whether these drugs could help with healthier aging and longevity.

"It's the most powerful drug we've ever seen for helping people lose body fat," exercise physiologist Pat Davidson, who is using an unapproved GLP-1 drug to help shred fat for bodybuilding, told Business Insider. "You are never putting that genie back in the bottle."

GLP-1s target dangerous belly fat

The trend isn't limited to high-powered sports stars.

In San Francisco, Dr. Nima Afshar, a concierge doctor at longevity-focused Private Medical, said he has "dozens" of elite clients who are using these drugs to remove dangerous visceral fat from their midsections and feel better in their bodies.

Visceral fat is stored deep in the belly, providing essential cushioning for vital organs such as the liver and kidneys. While some visceral fat is normal, too much can be a problem, as this fat is metabolically active, and can impact a person's risk of developing chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

Increasingly, Afshar is initiating conversations with patients who he says are "not that overweight" but who he thinks could use these drugs to boost their longevity by driving down visceral fat stores and lowering inflammation across the body.

"I almost don't use the word weight," Afshar said. "Some people can carry visceral fat, but tolerate it well and have no metabolic effects — that's uncommon." For most people, extra "toxic" mid-section fat, which is not always visible, "can ultimately make you not feel quite as good."

Once the negative signaling from that extra visceral fat is gone, a whole chain of health benefits can ensue, he said.

Afshar uses multiple clinical measurements — including InBody scans, routine bloodwork, liver and kidney ultrasounds, and blood pressure readings — to assess whether GLP-1s could be prescribed to improve a patient's health.

At the same time, he recommends all his patients on GLP-1s up their protein intake to "the maximum" recommended dose, and incorporate more movement into their daily routines, to help safeguard their musculature and prioritize fat loss over muscle wasting as they eat less food.

Some private insurers are getting wise to the same idea and mandating that patients adhere to some kind of exercise and nutrition program in order to get access to these medications.

Dr. Mitch Biermann, an obesity medicine physician at Scripps Health in San Diego, said the practice is emblematic of a wider shift in his field, toward a more holistic assessment of excess fat and body composition.

While insurance companies may not cover every indication (i.e., medical reason to take a drug), doctors are increasingly prescribing GLP-1s to a wider array of people with health concerns tied to carrying around excess weight, including joint pain, inflammation, and high blood pressure.

"I think there are quite a lot of indications that people can justifiably use the medicine," Biermann said. "There are just many different definitions of obesity now."

Bodybuilders and athletes are using peptides to get an edge

Whether it was steroids or insulin, bodybuilders have long used exogenous hormones to pursue bulgier muscles, along with protein-rich diets and more strength training than cardio.

GLP-1 drugs are essentially the next generation of that playbook: powerful new drugs that are like supercharged versions of our own hunger-checking hormones, which can help athletes get lean.

Take Davidson, the bodybuilder, who is gearing up for a couple of Mr. Universe-style bodybuilding competitions this July. He's aiming to cut his body fat, without sacrificing muscle.

So, alongside his ultra-high-protein, low-carb diet, he started taking an ultra-powerful but not-yet-released GLP-1 drug called retatrutide, which is still in development at Eli Lilly, about three months ago. (He's part of a groundswell of gym-goers tapping into underground "peptide" markets selling research materials.)

Davidson said he has lost over 30 pounds in three months. He feels like the GLP-1 has helped him maintain more strength than he usually does in the slim-down phase before a big event.

"I really haven't gotten any weaker," Davidson said.

Afshar said the "super optimizers" like Davidson are rarities in his practice, but he knows at least a few people who fit into the category.

Doctors vehemently recommend against doing this without medical supervision.

Williams is not part of this performance enhancement and fitness-optimization-through-peptides band of GLP-1 users; she is promoting these drugs for FDA-approved uses, including blood sugar control and clinical weight loss.

Still, her big comeback to the court next week is great news for the pro-peptide guys, who are keen to show that peptides are much more than drugs to treat chronic diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes.

• Donald Trump owns his own social media company.
• But Truth Social isn't where to go if you want a lot of people to see you attack Jimmy Kimmel.
• So Melania Trump made sure her demand that ABC do something about Kimmel appeared on Elon Musk's X, too.

Melania Trump says ABC should "take a stand" over Jimmy Kimmel, because she doesn't like a joke the talk show host made last week.

First things first: The first lady calling on a media company to do something about its employee because she doesn't like what that employee said is a bad thing. It's an attempt to use the power of the White House to silence speech that the White House doesn't like.

And it's just as worrisome as it was last September, when Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, told ABC owner Disney to "take action, frankly, on Kimmel" because Kimmel had made a joke about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk. Disney suspended Kimmel for a few days and then reinstated him after public outcry.

There is a difference between Carr's demand and Melania Trump's demand on Monday, since Carr is a regulator with direct oversight over parts of Disney's business, and Melania Trump doesn't have any formal power over … anything. But she's still using the power of the White House to try to control speech, and that should alarm anyone with any common sense. (I've asked her office for comment.)

Let's see how new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro responds to this one.

Much less important, but still interesting to me: The first lady's choice of platform to make her demand/threat. Melania Trump used Elon Musk's X, the site formally known as Twitter, to post her thoughts on Monday, using both her official First Lady of the United States account and her own personal account.

Trump also posted the same statement on Truth Social, the social media site owned by her husband. But that one seemed obligatory. Not in the way it's literally obligatory for Donald Trump to post at least some of his thoughts on his own social platform before he puts them anywhere else. But in the way you're supposed to tell your significant other you think they make the best pasta, when what you really crave is Olive Garden.

The numbers make it clear why Melania Trump chose to use X to make a splash: Her post on that platform has 230,000 likes, and that number is skyrocketing. Her Truth Social post has 6,500 likes and is traveling at a much more leisurely pace.

All of which is a reminder that while Truth Social is the Trump-owned Twitter alternative Donald Trump uses, it remains a minor-at-best platform. One that won't tell you how many users it has, and one that managed to lose more than $700 million on revenue of $3.7 million in 2025.

None of that is news, nor does it seem to matter to Trump, who still owns a company worth nearly $3 billion, even after a stock plunge and the departure of its CEO — perhaps because the company's current plan is to merge with a nuclear fusion company.

It also doesn't matter where Donald Trump truths or posts or spouts off — he's the president of the United States, so just about anything he says that's noteworthy gets instantly transmitted through the global media ecosystem. Like what happened on Monday afternoon, where he piggybacked on his wife's post and explicitly called on Disney and ABC to fire Kimmel.

But for the rest of us — including the first lady of the United States — where you post a message matters. Which is why she's using the one that helped her husband get into the White House in the first place.

• John Ternus, Apple's new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering.
• Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus's time at Virtual Research in the '90s.
• Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before joining Apple the same year.

Apple's John Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the tech giant, but one of his first engineering gigs was at a lesser-known company building virtual reality headsets.

Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple's CEO in September, might've had a hand in during his early engineering days.

Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.

"From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!," Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.

"It was an incredible headset for the time," Luckey told Business Insider.

He described the headset as well-balanced and relatively lightweight, with a field of vision that was ahead of that of other consumer products at the time. It mainly sold to military flight simulators for around $50,000, Luckey said.

Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would've been working at the company. He was an engineer at Virtual Research from 1997 to 2001, and joined Apple later that year, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus's time at Virtual Research, describes a similar-looking product, a virtual display apparatus for use in a virtual reality system. It supported the attachment of video displays.

Ternus is best known today as Apple's hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.

His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook's background is in operations.

The tech giant made its debut in the high-tech headset market in 2024 with the Vision Pro, which received a lukewarm response from the public. Its $3,500 price tag and lack of a killer app didn't wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.

Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.

"Vision Pro is an extraordinary product," Ternus said in a Tom's Guide interview earlier this month. "It's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present."

• Nicolás Maduro faces narco-terrorism charges in the US and awaits trial while legal fees remain unpaid.
• He was arrested in Venezuela and brought to the US in early January of this year.
• Maduro's Thursday court hearing focused on how his defense lawyers will get paid.

Eighty-two days after US military forces seized him and his wife from Caracas, Nicolás Maduro, the toppled president of Venezuela, walks into his 26th-floor Manhattan courtroom for the second time.

He has a long road to his trial.

The US Justice Department's narco-terrorism and weapons charges against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, still do not have a trial date. His attorney has said he expects "voluminous" motions challenging his seizure and detention.

The criminal case hasn't gotten to those issues yet.

Thursday's hearing focuses on how those lawyers will get paid.

The Venezuelan government has said it would pay for Maduro's and Flores's legal fees. But the payments are being held up by the US Treasury Department, which has not issued a waiver on the sanctions against Venezuela. Kyle Wirshba, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the payments were withheld because of "national security and foreign policy" reasons.

The issue appears to annoy US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, the 92-year-old judge overseeing the criminal case.

Peering through his large, round glasses that magnified his cheeks, he asks Wirshba how — when the Trump administration was doing business with Venezuela — Maduro and his wife could possibly present a "national security" threat.

"The defendant is here. Flores is here," Hellerstein says. "They present no national security threat."

Since their arrest, Maduro and Flores have been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, the infamous Brooklyn jail that has also been the temporary home of Sean "Diddy" Combs, Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Thursday's court hearing, across the East River, in Manhattan, begins 40 minutes late. Across the street from the courthouse, groups of pro-Maduro and anti-Maduro protesters shout at each other in front of a playground.

When Maduro walks into the courtroom, he has a bright, beaming smile on his face.

"Good morning!" he booms, wearing a jail outfit of a drab khaki smock over a bright orange shirt.

He shakes hands with his lead attorney, Barry Pollack, best known for representing Julian Assange. Then he turns to the journalists sitting on dark-wood benches in the audience and wishes them "good morning" again.

Flores, wearing the same outfit, plus a brown scrunchie holding back her blonde hair, says nothing.

When they sit at the defense table, they wear big, black headphones through which they hear the court proceedings translated into Spanish for them.

During the hearing, Flores's attorney Mark Donnelly says "First Lady Maduro" needed an echocardiogram to evaluate an issue with her heart.

"There are no titles to be used in this court," the judge says, before telling the lawyer to keep him informed if Flores didn't get the treatment she needed in jail.

Venezuela's now-former first couple ended up in New York City to face an indictment brought by the Department of Justice.

Prosecutors accuse them of participating in a decadeslong drug-trafficking conspiracy involving Colombian terrorist organizations, which enriched themselves and their family at the expense of Venezuelan citizens. The charges include narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and machine gun possession.

In January, after US forces captured the couple from a military fort in Caracas where they were staying, President Donald Trump called Maduro an "illegitimate dictator" responsible for funneling "colossal amounts of deadly illicit drugs" into the United States.

The President said that he and his wife "now face American justice" for their "campaign of deadly narco-terrorism."

From the White House on Thursday, Trump called Maduro a "very dangerous man who has killed a lot of people" and said the charges against him were for just "a fraction" of his conduct — with more to come.

"Other cases are going to be brought, as you probably know," he said.

But today is not yet about the core of the matter.

Wirshba, the prosecutor, argues that it would be inappropriate for OFAC, the part of the Treasury Department that grants licenses for sanctions waivers, to allow Maduro and Flores to access the wealth of the nation they "plundered."

According to Wirshba, Maduro should have anticipated he could not have gotten the money from Venezuela to the US due to the sanctions, leading Hellerstein to remark upon the oddness of the Venezuelan president being captured from his nation and brought to New York City.

"He didn't think he would be in this court?" The judge asks with a sarcastic tone.

Hellerstein — who has overseen cases involving financial scammers like Charlie Javice, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the 9/11 terror attacks in his 28 years on the bench — calls Maduro's case "unique."

While there have been other cases that addressed whether criminal defendants could use potentially "tainted" funds to pay their lawyers, all of those cases involved money that was already held in a US bank. In any case, Hellerstein says, Venezuela had already agreed to pay for the legal defense.

When a criminal defendant can't afford their own lawyer, a judge can appoint one for them. But Hellerstein says the "investigative responsibilities" that would be required to defend the complex narco-terrorism case would overwhelm the resources of a publicly-funded lawyer.

But it remains unclear what Hellerstein could do about it. Forcing OFAC to issue a waiver would require a separate lawsuit brought in a different court, in Washington, DC, Wirshba says.

The only remedy, Pollack says, was to "dismiss the case" and let Maduro walk free.

Hellerstein initially pours cold water on the idea.

"I'm not going to dismiss the case," he says.

But if OFAC didn't soon change its position, he would consider it.

"I think it is such a serious step — I'm not going to take it now," Hellerstein said.

After one and a half hours, Hellerstein decides he would hold another hearing, at an unspecified later date, to determine what steps he should take.

When Maduro leaves the courtroom, he only glances back at the audience behind him. He shakes the hands of his attorneys and walks stiffly toward the door. Flores kisses her lawyer, Donnelly, on the cheek.

Outside, the protesters are leaving. As a man passes by the courthouse, he yells: "Viva Maduro!"

• Noise-canceling headphones have been around for decades, but I never tried them — until now.
• I was so confused and freaked out by the sudden silence when I put in my new AirPods 4.
• I felt scared, like a caveman at a monster truck rally. Embarassing, really!

It's March of 2026, and I just bought my first pair of noise-cancelling headphones. I'm shocked, astounded, perturbed, and horrified: Is this how you people have been walking around all this time?!

Last week, after losing my right AirPods 3 earbud, I ordered a new pair of AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation. They're the first headphones I've ever worn with noise canceling.

Of course, noise-cancelling technology in headphones has been around since the 1980s, and became popular in big squishy over-the-ear Bose headphones in the 2000s. Noise canceling has been part of the AirPods Pro lineup since 2019. For some reason, I just ... never tried them.

My first experience with noise canceling

I set up my new AirPods over the weekend while waiting around in the parents' zone at a trampoline park. Because I didn't bother reading the instructions, which suggest pairing by holding the case next to your phone, I simply put the unpaired earbuds into my ears.

Immediately, everything went quiet. I looked around, confused. Did the loud trampoline park just turn off the upbeat pop music they were blasting? Why was everyone suddenly silent? Is there an emergency? Was someone hurt? Oh god, was my kid hurt?! I was panicked, scanning the other tables where adults idly sat looking at phones or tying preschoolers' shoes. No one else seemed to be concerned.

I took out the AirPods, and whoooosh — the music and din flooded back. My brain scrambled to make sense of the sensory experiences hitting it, slowly realizing that this was what noise-canceling does. I was like a caveman being shown a Bic lighter; fearful and confused. I was like the proverbial Victorian child who would pass out if you showed it the AI-generated video of anthropomorphic fruits on "Love Island."

This is incredibly embarrassing on one level because I am a professional technology journalist who generally tries to stay up to date and informed about interesting personal tech devices. The fact that I had never used noise-canceling headphones was an odd oversight.

I don't have good reasons for this, but I do have some weak excuses.

First and foremost, I'm cheap. And in my mind, headphones are something you shouldn't have to spend more than $20 on — up until the iPhone 12, Apple included a free set of corded headphones in the box with a new iPhone or iPod. I had a drawer overflowing with them! Headphones were just something that came into your life, like a cheap black umbrella — you didn't seek them out or intentionally buy them. Now, suddenly, I'm expected to drop a C-note on them?

When AirPods launched in 2016, I initially waved them off as overpriced and frivolous. It looked too easy to lose one. But eventually I gave in and, of course, realized that AirPods are incredibly convenient and great to use (I was right about them being easy to lose, however). Now, it's hard to imagine ever going back to wired headphones, no matter how much Gen Z makes it look cool.

My other main reason is that because I use headphones while walking down the street, riding the subway, or in other public situations, the idea of not being able to hear my surroundings felt like a safety issue. Sure, it might be nice on a plane, but it didn't make sense for my main headphone use.

Jury's still out on whether I like the noise canceling

As I've been playing around with the new noise-canceling headphones, I'm not sure how much I actually like them. Taking them in and out is disorienting, like coming up to the surface too fast while scuba diving (or, what I imagine that feels like).

I tried them at the gym, where they seemed useful, but at home, my husband (who has had noise-canceling headphones for a decade) was mildly frustrated when he tried to talk to me, not realizing I had them in. Understandable!

The AirPod 4s can turn active noise-canceling on and off if you rub the earbud's stem, but I haven't quite mastered this yet — I've tried and sort of fumbled around, turning my podcast on and off and knocking it out of my ear. I'll keep working at it.

I'm just glad to have finally joined the 21st century.

• Miro's CEO says the company is plowing cash into AI subscriptions to help employees level up.
• "Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," Andrey Khusid said.
• AI adoption is accelerating, and with it come questions about the technology's ROI.

Plenty of companies are still debating whether costly AI subscriptions are worth it. Miro has gone the other way.

Andrey Khusid, cofounder of Miro, the maker of a popular online whiteboard platform, says the company gives employees essentially unlimited access to the latest AI tools as a way to speed up how quickly they learn and work.

That approach is possible, he said, because Miro has been profitable since 2016. The company has raised $476 million to date, and Khusid suggested it does not expect to need more capital.

Khusid framed the spending as a core part of more traditional workplace training. "Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," he said.

Rather than asking employees to learn on their own time or pay out of pocket, he said, Miro wants that experimentation to happen inside the company, as a shared effort. He later added that there should still be a clear business case for buying any tool.

Miro's strategy is part of a wider shift in tech, where AI adoption is moving from optional to expected. A new study from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish, based on data from more than 700 companies, found that 64% now produce a majority of their code with AI assistance. Tech giants like Google are pushing employees to use AI tools more aggressively, and Microsoft has begun tying AI usage to performance evaluations. As a result, AI fluency is quickly becoming a core workplace skill rather than a nice-to-have.

Still, Khusid says many executives ask the wrong question about AI ROI. Rather than judging the tools on individual productivity gains or subscription costs, he said Miro is trying to focus on whether the company is moving faster overall.

The company tracks projects through what he described as a "discover, define, deliver" process and measures how long it takes to move from one stage to the next. The goal is to compress that timeline as much as possible.

"The most important metric from my perspective is velocity of innovation," Khusid said. "If you don't innovate fast enough, you're out of the game."

Khusid said he doesn't think the way companies use AI today is necessarily the end state. He said it will take at least until the end of this year, or even next year, to see what a workplace shaped by these tools really looks like. At that point, Miro will take a harder look at which tools are worth the price tag.

For now, he said, Miro is already seeing time savings across engineering, product, and design. That's not always the case, though. Better tools speed code generation, he said, but code reviews can still bog down projects.

"Humans have to read it," Khusid said. At least for now.

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