In 1931, New York’s Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world and a symbol of America’s place on the world stage after World War II.
The genius who made today’s skyscrapers possible
In 1931, New York’s Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world and a symbol of America’s place on the world stage after World War II.
Skyscrapers, for all their bombast, were seen as massively inefficient, and anything taller than the Empire State Building was inherently dangerous: the sheer amount of steel required to keep it upright was hardly worth the investment.
That was before Fazlur Rahman Khan came along. A Bangladeshi-born engineer who moved to America, Khan’s “tube” design opened the door for a new generation of skyscrapers that could be built safely and efficiently. His designs have been behind the world’s tallest buildings since the World Trade Centre in 1972.
Fazlur Rahman Khan was born in 1929 in what is now Dhaka in central Bangladesh, but was then British India. After studying Civil Engineering, he won a scholarship in the United States in 1952, where he studied at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Khan’s breakthrough was a new design in which a building was not held up by central supports of steel, but by the exterior frame of the building. A series of vertical tubes make up the frame, which creates a suprising rigidity that protects against high wind speeds and earthquakes. It also allows more space inside the building.
The first of Khan’s designs to use the idea was the DeWitt-Chestnut building in Chicago, then Chicago’s famous John Hancock Centre in 1968. At the time it was the world’s second tallest building after the Empire State.
Khan’s skyscraper designs are still used today, which make him one of the most influential architects and engineers in history.
People who exercise may have bigger brains
Poor physical fitness in middle age might be associated with a smaller brain size later on, according to a study published in an online issue of Neurology.
Brains shrink as people age, and the atrophy is related to cognitive decline and increased risk for dementia, and exercise reduces that deterioration and cognitive decline.
In this study, more than 1,500 people at an average age of 40 and without dementia or heart disease took a treadmill test. Twenty years later, they took another test, along with MRI brain scans.
The study found those who didn’t perform well on the treadmill test — a sign of poor fitness — had smaller brains 20 years later. Among those who performed lower, people who hadn’t developed heart problems and weren’t using medication for blood pressure had the equivalent of one year of accelerated brain aging. Those who had developed heart problems or were using medication had the equivalent of two years of accelerated brain aging.
Their exercise capacity was measured using the length of time participants could exercise on the treadmill before their heart rate reached a certain level.
This study shows that for people with heart disease, fitness might be particularly important for prevention of brain aging.
