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Hmmmm … More of the Trump Administration’s wasted dollars!

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The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was intended to reopen as a patriotic showpiece of Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., beautification plan, with the bottom of the pool freshly coated in what he called “American flag blue” and the feature ready for the country’s 250th anniversary. The project, which began in April, cost an estimated $14.7 million, according to a contract summary from the Department of the Interior.

In early June water began to flow back into the pool. Soon after the blue gave way to green, as algae spread across the shallow basin, and crews began trying to knock it back with hydrogen peroxide and other treatments. Efforts are ongoing.

The green pool quickly became an online spectacle, and scientists began weighing in on what the color could reveal about the water. Scientific American spoke with one of them—Ashley Bair, a senior research developer at Usalco, which makes coagulants and other water-treatment chemicals. Bair got her Ph.D. studying cyanobacteria. In the conversation, she explained what might be happening in the Reflecting Pool and what can be done about it.

When you first saw images of the Reflecting Pool turned green, what did you think?

Honestly, my pool turns green all the time, so it didn’t shock me. We could have predicted it, but there’s no guarantee that it was going to happen.

Why would algae bloom in a place like the Reflecting Pool?

The algae are either eukaryotic algae, such as green algae, or cyanobacteria, which are bacterial algae, or a combination of the two. But no matter what they are, they need nutrients to grow. So they need light for photosynthesis, nutrients, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and some warmth for there to be any biochemical activity that allows them to happen. At this time of year, though, there’s plenty of light, and there’s plenty of heat.

How much of the bloom would you pin on the heat?

I know people are associating the painting of the bottom of the pool as causing more heat in the water. And maybe it increased the temperature slightly, but there’s plenty of heat in Washington, D.C., right now to fuel an algal bloom. So I do not believe that that was a major factor in this bloom.

In fact, back in 2012, when the pool was refilled, the same thing happened, and it hadn’t been painted at the time, right? So really what’s fueling this, the only thing that’s going to be limiting an algal bloom this time of year, are nutrients.

Limiting nutrients for algae, whether they’re cyanobacteria or green algae, are going to be phosphate and nitrogen. If [the algae are] cyanobacteria, they’re more likely to be limited by phosphates because a lot of them are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen.

I do know that the water, if it is filled from the Tidal Basin, is treated somewhat, with filtration and ozone for disinfection. But that’s not going to remove phosphate. Typically, for that, you’re going to need to coagulate your water, which will remove organics and phosphates.

If phosphates are basically alga food, why would the water in the Reflecting Pool have phosphates in it?

From what I understand, [the National Park Service] converted the pool to fill from the Tidal Basin back in 2009. And I believe they did that so that they wouldn’t have to go to the expense of using the city water supply, especially when you’re completely refilling that pool at 6.5 million gallons. The Tidal Basin fills from the Potomac River, so it’s natural water and can contain some runoff contaminants.

There can be high levels of phosphate from [pollution] point sources or from agricultural runoff, which is a big issue.

f phosphate is helping fuel the bloom, how would operators remove it from the water?

I would have recommended that they do some sort of coagulation treatment to remove the phosphate.

Coagulants are metal-based chemicals, either aluminum coagulants or iron coagulants. And what these do is form complexes with organics and phosphates. And [the coagulant] takes these dissolved organics and phosphates and precipitates them [so they fall to the bottom of the pool]. And then you can either vacuum it out or, if you were treating it prior to it going into the pool…, just let [the water without phosphates] go over a weir, and the sludge stays at the bottom.

Why might hydrogen peroxide fail to get rid of the algae?

They didn’t use enough of it. The Reflecting Pool is stagnant. It’s reflecting, so you want it to be very still. It’s designed that way. Peroxide doesn’t have time to diffuse into the middle before it’s done. So they only poured it around the edges…. They should have covered it evenly.

Peroxide is actually a very effective algicide. There are peroxide-based products that are used as algicides. Now, typically, when they’re labeled as an algicide, they’re going to be a stabilized form because peroxide doesn’t last very long. It breaks down really easily. Fortunately, it breaks down into oxygen and water, which [are nontoxic, and that’s] why it’s so great. I call it the nuclear option. If you really want to just kill your bloom, you use it, but it’s not going to last.

The other issue is: once you use it, you’re lysing those cells. So you’re breaking down the cells, which means phosphates are released back into the water. So now you have dissolved phosphates coming from the breakdown of these algal cells that you’ve killed with algicide. So you’re going to fuel “bloomageddon.” Typically, when you use a peroxide-based algicide, if you don’t follow up with either a phosphate-removal treatment or a copper treatment as a static algicide, you’re going to have a rebound growth. And I would expect that within a week or two, more likely a week.

Could a bloom in the Reflecting Pool be more than just a cosmetic problem for America’s 250th?

I’ve seen pictures with surface scums coming from [the Reflecting Pool] that are typically indicative of cyanobacteria, [which] have the potential to produce cyanotoxins, which have the potential to be fatal if ingested. It’s important that we understand that this is a serious thing. It’s not just something to laugh about.

There was just a lot of misinformation going around. I just wanted to share my thoughts on “Hey, this is what I think is happening.” It’s kind of a cool thing, and I’d like to see this dealt with because, you know, there is potential for this bloom to have cyanobacteria in it.

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Hayley Rodriguez’s father is one of many soccer fans who had always dreamed of attending a World Cup game. But when the global event arrived in his city for the first time, the ticket prices made him resign himself to once again watching on television in his Los Angeles home.

What he didn’t realize was that Rodriguez, 21, had been secretly working with her two siblings to score tickets for him, checking daily to see if they could find a game they could afford.

“It was just funny to hear him be like … ‘If only I was going,’ and in our head we were just like, ‘Just you wait,’” Rodriguez said. “It felt great to be able to surprise the one man that doesn’t accept gifts with the one thing he’s always mentioned wanting.”

With the World Cup in North America for the first time in three decades, Rodriguez is one of a slew of people in the United States now taking the opportunity to surprise their dads with the ultimate Father’s Day gift.

Rodriguez said her dad, a longtime truck driver who put her and her siblings above everything, has never been one to treat himself to anything. Even when given the tickets, she said, his first instinct was to insist they should sell them instead, claiming that he’d rather watch from home.

But at the Iran vs. New Zealand game in Los Angeles on Monday, he made it clear to everybody that he was living out his dream.

“He was calling everybody in his contact list, FaceTiming them, sending them pictures to show them where he’s at, telling them how he got tickets to the World Cup,” Rodriguez said. “It felt great because me and my siblings have always talked about how, honestly, our dad’s our world.”

It’s a sentiment shared by others who saw the World Cup as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give back to the fathers who sacrificed everything for them.

Diana Figueira, 25, had been chasing tickets since December. One day, she had two phones open, both plugged into a charger with their auto-locks off so that they’d stay on for the six hours she waited in the resale queue. Eventually, she used her bonus from work to get tickets at around $850 each for Portugal vs. the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“I knew he was going to be out-of-this-world excited … I got some jerseys, and I printed a little paper that said that we’re gonna go to the match, and I surprised him with a box with the jerseys and the message,” she said. “Funny thing, he didn’t see the message. He was just so excited about the jerseys. And then later, when I told him we’re going to the World Cup, he lost it.”

Not only was the game in their own city of Houston, she said, but her father has also rooted for Portugal his entire life. Though she and her dad are originally from Venezuela, they have Portuguese roots, she added, making Wednesday’s game a perfect choice as Venezuela didn’t qualify for the event.

“All the money in the world would’ve been worth that experience,” Figueira said. “Just seeing the excitement, seeing a dream come true for him, it just meant everything to me.”

To Jesús Morales, 29, spending more than $10,000 on tickets for the opening World Cup game felt like the least he could do for his father, who immigrated to the U.S. with “nothing but a dream.”

Morales flew his dad from Chicago to Mexico City so he can root for his home team in Mexico’s match against South Africa. Entering the stadium together felt like a scene out of a movie, he said, tearing up at the memory.

“He had dreams of going to the World Cup since he was 8 years old,” he added. “He told me he dreamed of being a professional soccer player, but unfortunately, he didn’t have those resources to be able to pursue that path.”

Now, at almost 60 years old, his dad still plays the sport recreationally, Morales said.

For many immigrants in the United States, seeing the World Cup come to North America has given them a rare opportunity to display national pride for both their past and present homes.

“Immigrants can come and build a life for themselves here, but also still support their home countries in the World Cup, in the country that they’re now calling home,” said Sasha Abdallah, who recently surprised her Egypt-born dad with tickets. “I don’t think any other country in the world, aside from the U.S., which has such a melting pot population, gets to have this unique World Cup experience.”

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England fans celebrate after a 4-2 World Cup win over Croatia in Arlington, Texas, on Wednesday.Michael Steele / Getty Images

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A play about escape from the city into nature never had as apt a backdrop.

What makes the coup de théâtre possible is the theater itself: a $41 million building designed for Hudson Valley Shakespeare by the architect Jeanne Gang and her colleagues at Studio Gang.

“As You Like It,” opening Saturday night, is the inaugural production in the timber-framed, open-sided, turtle-like structure, after years in which the company performed at leased locations under temporary tents. A stage made of sand on the banks of a marsh sometimes meant returning from a show encrusted with grit and pocked with mosquito bites.

But the new theater, formally the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center, is not merely an aesthetic and customer-experience upgrade. It is a reflection of the company’s enhanced ambitions. So when the cast of “As You Like It” makes its downstage cross — a move used in many previous H.V.S. productions, if only from as far away as a parking lot — it says something new about tradition, change, and resilience.

For Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director, what it says is, “Here we come.”

The theater, part of a new H.V.S. campus on a high hill in Garrison, N.Y., embodies the convergence of two histories: the institution’s and the land’s.

For thousands of years, the land was part of the territory of the Wappinger people. The Dutch started farming in the 1700s, which in a way continued into the early 20th century, when the site became home to Bill Brown’s Health Farm, a retreat for New York gentlemen in want of pummeling by a former boxing promoter.

Next came the golf course, in 1961, with its clear-cutting and chemicals. To prevent the site’s further commercialization and environmental decline when it was sold to condominium developers in 1999, the billionaire investment manager Christopher Davis swooped in to buy it.

By then, the land was profoundly damaged, he said: a mere “facsimile of a landscape.” For the next 20 years, he sought a plan to remediate and restore it while also converting it to a loftier and more public use.

Unknown to him, in another part of the forest, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (as it was then called) had offered its first production in September 1987, a four-show run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in a rainy meadow nearby. The following summer, production moved to a rent-a-tent in the gardens of Boscobel House, a 19th-century mansion on the Hudson: pretty but buggy.

Despite offering just one show a season, the company’s impact grew; in 1994, a second show was added, and in 2008, a third. In between, the company acquired its own customized tent. By 2021, having been among the first New York theaters to reopen after the Covid shutdown — the open-sided tent was, in that sense, a blessing — H.V.S. could consider itself a well-regarded, smallish regional summer repertory theater with Shakespeare as its touchstone.

But lease renewal negotiations with Boscobel had by then broken down. H.V.S. would have to uproot.

There is something quite Shakespearean about the tale, with its seers, players, banishments and reversals. But seldom has a denouement been so magically devised. Two years earlier, in 2019, McCallum and the H.V.S. board, seeking a Plan B in case Boscobel fell through, had approached Davis to see whether the theater could temporarily pitch its tent on a corner of his property. They received a stunning response. Davis suggested that instead of a quick fix, why not build a permanent home there? It was just the adaptive reuse he was seeking.

What’s more, he would give them the entire 98 acres for free, including a wedding and restaurant business expected to throw off several hundred thousand dollars a year. Plan B became Plan A. “No strings,” McCallum recalled.

No strings does not, however, mean no ties.

Continuing to produce new seasons in their tent, now pitched in a dank hollow in a corner of the golf course, the H.V.S. team had to confront the enormous implications of the gift. Could they afford to build a theater worthy of the site? (Gang, whose firm designed the 101-story St. Regis Chicago and the 230,000-square-foot Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History, called it “the biggest, most fabulous place I’ve ever worked.”)

Even if they could afford to build it, could they afford to run it? If so, would that mean raising prices, sidelining Shakespeare and cramming more people under the tent — thus destroying the soul they were seeking to save?

“We knew it was an historic opportunity, and we wanted to seize it with both hands,” McCallum said. “We didn’t want to assume we would operate the way we always have just because we always have.”

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The new home for Hudson Valley Shakespeare is an open-sided, turtle-like structure that cost $41 million. Credit…Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

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In 2019, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson began to experiment on himself by taking daily injections of rapamycin. This immunosuppressant drug is typically used to prevent organ rejection after transplants, but the 48-year-old technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist had a different goal — to extend his life.

He tested several protocols, experimenting with weekly, biweekly and other schedules. He tried 5-milligram doses as well as 6-mg and 10-mg ones. But in September 2024, Johnson decided to end his personal trial with rapamycin: the benefits didn’t outweigh the drawbacks, which Johnson outlined in a post on social-media platform X. He had intermittent skin infections, high glucose levels and abnormalities in his blood lipid levels, plus a heightened resting heart rate. “With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected Rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it entirely,” he wrote.

Johnson, who sold his mobile-payment business Braintree to financial-technology firm PayPal in 2013 for US$800 million, often tinkers with his daily regimen of drugs, peptides in the form of both supplements and injections and other medical interventions in pursuit of a longer life. He’s part of a growing crowd of tech entrepreneurs who are seeking extra years by hacking their own bodies —

and sharing their exploits widely through social media and other channels.

Johnson’s Blueprint protocol — a self-published guide to his life changes and medical choices — has been adapted over time. He and his team told Nature that “the new focus of our protocol is to tackle chronic conditions that current medicine accepts as manageable but not treatable, and to render them treatable through advanced diagnostics and next-generation personalized therapeutics”.

As with Johnson and rapamycin, it’s not uncommon for these biohacking influencers to suddenly stop using a product that they previously thought would help them to extend their lives. For years, supplements called exogenous ketones — which raise ketone levels in the blood, lower blood glucose, and supposedly improve cognition — were widely embraced in Silicon Valley circles. The compounds were sold as a premium cognition aid and a stimulant for executives.

In March, however, entrepreneur Tim Ferriss and venture capitalist Kevin Rose used their popular podcast to warn listeners about taking supplements that contain a compound called 1,3-butanediol. Emerging data from animal models, said Ferriss, indicate that it might give mice a condition similar to fatty liver disease. “Treat it like ethanol,” he warned, “like you’re drinking moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.” The animal findings have not been confirmed in human studies, and some manufacturers dispute the characterization.

This supplement joins a long list of life-extension tricks that tech leaders have latched onto despite questions about their effectiveness and safety. In 2019 and again in 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against ‘young plasma’ infusions, in which people receive blood transfusions from young individuals. These infusions are being promoted as an anti-ageing therapy — and are something that Johnson regularly incorporates into his wellness regimen, courtesy of his son.

Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel told Bloomberg News in 2014 that he takes human growth hormone in hopes of living for 120 years, despite the Mayo Clinic, a renowned US medical centre, warning of substantial risks and saying that there is little evidence that the drug helps healthy adults to regain youth or energy. Thiel did not respond to Nature’s questions about whether he still takes the hormone or what he makes of the Mayo Clinic’s guidance.

In hopes of enhancing cognition, some Silicon Valley tech leaders have touted methylene blue, a compound with a long history as a textile dye that has been approved for limited medical use, mainly to treat a rare blood disorder. And they are promoting nicotine pouches — marketed as an alternative to smoking — as a way to optimize focus and energy, despite well-documented concerns about addiction.

These wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of early-stage science to the public, who turn preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks that combine supplements, other compounds, protocols and therapies, long before FDA approval. “It’s a trickle-down effect due to the nature of platforms they use to spread their content,” says Margje Camps, a researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who studies health influencers.

But there is a danger to this growing phenomenon: researchers who study ageing and longevity warn that these biohacks have not been clinically tested, meaning that it’s unclear whether they work or might harm people.

There is no medical intervention that is proven to extend human life by targeting ageing itself, says Andrew Steele, an independent longevity researcher based in Berlin and author of the book Ageless (2022). “There probably are things on our radars that might work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans.”

Biological basis

Nir Barzilai, president of the Academy of Geroscience and a genetics researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, is torn about the impacts that the biohackers have. Take Johnson’s tinkering with various supplements and drugs, which is usually based on some kind of evidence: “If you’re asking, ‘Is he taking something that doesn’t make sense?’ I would say, no, these things are based on biology but not on clinical evidence,” says Barzilai.

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Alexey Brin/Getty Images

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GUADALAJARA, MEXICO – JUNE 11: In-Beom Hwang #6 of Korea Republic scores his team’s first goal past Matej Kovar #1 of Czechia during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group A match between Korea Republic and Czechia at Guadalajara Stadium on June 11, 2026, in Guadalajara, Mexico. (Photo by Lars Baron/Getty Images)Getty Images

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Note:

1 . Read the initial section below.  2 . Click the Link Below the Picture.  3 . View the slideshow, skip the narrative you already read, read the next 8 sections, and click (read more) for each section.  4 . (Read more 68 Comments). 5. Enjoy some USA history and give yourself a gold star for being able to follow this note!

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Booker T. Washington

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