Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams - 25 April, 2014

Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams

The Standard & Poor’s credit agency has recently cut Russia’s credit rating for the first time in more than five years, citing the capital flight and risk to investment in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.
Russia’s economic growth slowed to 0.8 percent in the first quarter — sharply worse than earlier forecast — while spooked investors pulled about $70 billion out of the country in 2013. However, the cut in Russia’s rating from BBB to BBB- is the most tangible economic result of Russia’s policies toward Ukraine so far.
BBB- is just a step above a speculative or non-investment grade.
S&P said in a statement that they revised Russia's rating because the tense situation “could see additional significant outflows of both domestic and foreign capital from the Russian economy.”
Rating agencies had not cut Russia’s sovereign rating since December 2008.

Kingdom Tower will be 568 feet taller than Khalifa Tower, the current Guinness World Record holder in neighboring Dubai, once it is completed. The tower is the first phase of Jeddah Economic Company's approximately $20 billion, 17 million-square-foot Kingdom City project, of which it will be the focal point. Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company, a partner in JEC.
Foundation work for the $1.2 billion skyscraper began in December, and above-ground work will start April 27. The 200-floor tower will be located in Jeddah, a culturally significant city near the Red Sea that is known as the gateway to Mecca.
Kingdom Tower will house a Four Seasons hotel, luxury condominiums, office space and an observatory.

For the first time after their reunion, doubles duo of Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa made it to the quarterfinals of an event outside India.
The pair stunned third seeds A Duanganong and V Kunchala 21-11, 21-18 in the pre-quarters of the Badminton Asian Championship in Gimcheon, South Korea.
PV Sindhu and RMV Gurusaidutt joined the doubles specialists in the quarterfinals. While Sindhu defeated Eriko Hirose for the first time in her career 14-21, 21-13, 21-18, Guru registered a hard-fought victory over Wang Tzu Wei of Chinese Taipei 17-21, 21-13, 21-19.

The helix is a complex shape found in many natural settings. It is commonly illustrated by the shape of DNA molecules. The roots of some plants also burrow as helices, like corkscrews winding downward in search of richer soil. But during an experiment at Harvard University, mechanical engineers were surprised when a pair of rubber ribbons expected to form a helix did not, buckling into a shape rarely observed in nature.
Every helix winds in a left or right direction. The engineers observed what they called a hemihelix: a helix that changes its direction midway. The region along which it changes its direction is called aperversion. Charles Darwin observed plant tendrils forming hemihelices in 1888.
Starting with two strips of an elastic polymer of different lengths, the engineers stretched the shorter one to be the same length as the other. Then, while maintaining the stretching force, they joined the strips side-by-side. As the force was dwindled, the bi-strip twisted and bent to create either a helix or a hemihelix.
As energy due to stretching flows through the strip, the strip twists to reduce the load it bears. However, imperfections in the material could cause the strip to buckle at certain places, where perversions form and the chirality reverses.