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The decision of whether to have children is a deeply personal one—so personal that it may be influenced by the attachment style someone develops in their own childhood. Attachment styles are psychological frameworks that form in the first years of life based on the quality of interactions with primary caregivers; research suggests that they influence how we relate to friends, parents, and partners throughout life.

Broadly speaking, psychologists recognize four different attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious/preoccupied attachment, avoidant/dismissive attachment, and disorganized/fearful attachment. According to attachment theory, securely attached people’s needs were reliably met by caregivers, and as a result, they have confidence in their closest relationships. The other three categories are types of insecure attachment: people with these attachment styles tend to have difficulties with trust and intimacy as a result of their early needs being rejected or inconsistently met.

A study published in April in the International Journal of Psychology found that people who have fearful or preoccupied attachment styles tend to want and to have slightly more children than those with secure attachment styles. The findings, while not definitive, suggest that people with these insecure attachments could be compensating for their attachment by having more children.

According to co-author T. Joel Wade, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, these findings make intuitive sense because insecurely attached people tend to struggle to form lasting bonds with others. “They might think, ‘Even if my partner leaves me, I’m not going to be alone because I’ll have a relationship with a child.’”

This interpretation is “theoretically sensible,” says Lisa Welling, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who was not involved in the research. “Fearfully attached individuals may be having children in part to feel more secure in their relationships or to forge stronger bonds through their children,” she says.

Wade and his colleagues used a research firm to administer an online survey to 15,120 participants equally divided across Japan, Canada and the U.S. The survey included measures that identified the participants’ attachment styles, as well as questions about how many children they desired and how many children they already had.

Across the full sample, those with insecure attachments reported wanting slightly larger families than those with secure ones, and insecure attachment was likewise modestly associated with having more children. This finding specifically held true for people with fearful and preoccupied attachment styles, two subtypes of insecure attachment associated with a craving for intimacy but, respectively, a deep fear of it or a fear of rejection and abandonment. When pooled, these effects were small but significant; when broken out by individual countries, however, the associations grew weaker. Still, “the sample size is very large, so statistically significant findings can emerge even when the practical effects are small,” Welling says.

Conversely, having a secure attachment style was linked with having fewer children. The trend was only seen in populations in the U.S. and Canada; in Japan, the researchers found no relationship between secure attachment and number of children. Wade suspects that social norms might explain these differences, with couples in Japan possibly feeling more pressure to have children than those in more individualistic Western countries such as the U.S. and Canada. “Culture can be a moderating factor,” Wade says.

Welling notes that the study was based on a one-time online survey and that the findings need to be replicated with future research—but overall, she says, the authors provide “a solid foundation for what I hope will be a growing area of investigation.”

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An outbreak of tornadoes killed at least two people and left a path of destruction in Illinois and Indiana on Sunday after a tornado earlier in the day killed a person in Kansas.

Nearly three dozen tornado reports were logged by the Storm Prediction Center in Illinois and Indiana, as supercell thunderstorms roared across the region.

In Illinois, Sunday’s tornadoes piled onto what had already been a record-active year for them in the state. The 149 tornadoes recorded as of June 17 broke the state’s previous record high for a year of 142 set in 2024, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford said.

Sunday’s tornadoes were part of a more widespread outburst of severe thunderstorms with damaging winds across the Midwest and Plains that knocked out power to tens of thousands. A continuous path of wind damage from southwest Kansas into Oklahoma was caused by a long-lived and powerful thunderstorm cluster called a derecho, a preliminary report from the National Weather Service said.

And the threat isn’t over on Monday. Tornado chances are low, but the overall storm threat will shift east to cover many more people across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

Deadly tornadoes hit Illinois, Kansas

At least two people were killed Sunday in rural Jefferson County, Illinois, around 90 miles southeast of St. Louis, according to county Sheriff Jeff Bullard.

Both victims died in separate mobile homes that were destroyed about two to three miles apart, Bullard said. A third home was completely leveled and five other people were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Bullard said.

The storms damaged at least 20 homes in the county, Deputy Emergency Management Coordinator Keith Hertenstein said. Trees and power lines were knocked down, leaving some residents without electricity.

Earlier Sunday, one person was also found dead in Sedgwick County, Kansas, after a manufactured home was blown off its foundation by an EF2 tornado, the county said in a statement and the National Weather Service later confirmed.

Tornadoes also tore through southern Indiana. Around 30 homes were damaged in Gibson County, Sheriff Bruce Vanoven told CNN. Some were completely destroyed, including the house and barn at a farmstead that lost everything, he said.

The nearly 100-year-old Blythe Chapel in Owensville, Indiana, was also destroyed.

Several buildings in Gibson County, including a 96-year-old chapel, were destroyed after powerful storms swept through the area Sunday night. Gibson County Sheriff’s Office

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While Gibson County’s tornado siren system was activated, some sirens in Owensville and Princeton did not sound due to old age. Those are being replaced with new sirens, and the system is being updated so that it can be activated directly by the National Weather Service, according to Vanoven.

None of the areas where sirens malfunctioned had tornado damage, he said.

The storm tore through a retirement community in neighboring Warrick County, Sheriff Mike Wilder told CNN. Two roofs collapsed at the Park Place Apartments in the town of Newburgh, trapping a woman who had to be rescued by emergency officials, Wilder said. The woman and two others suffered minor injuries but refused treatment at the scene.

Also in Newburgh, a woman visiting her parents at a different apartment complex witnessed debris “flying everywhere” and watched from her car as a tornado ripped through a parking lot and pool.

“It was like, boom … 200 yards from my vehicle, as I sat there with my car in reverse, ready to pull off,” Ka’Lisha Puckett told CNN. She said firefighters knocked on her parents’ door at Bell Pointe Apartments to prepare them to evacuate because of damage to their roof.

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Tornado spotted in Illinois as severe storms sweep through the Midwest

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When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full-time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity, or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full-time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers, and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures, and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full-time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue, and interruptions from partners, children, and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.

Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on-site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay, and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning, and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.

One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.

Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.

Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggle to patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)

Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.

Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

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JooHee Yoon

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Feeling Good!

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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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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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