Berlin - An eyeliner pencil that is too hard can be softened by holding it over a flame or simply by blowing on it, said the Berlin branch of Germany's consumer product testing organization.

The organization tested 16 black eyeliner pencils, including one that has to be sharpened and those with an in-built, automatic mechanism for sharpening. Five of the eyeliner pencils were rated good in a report by the organization's monthly magazine. The remainder were rated satisfactory, including an 18-euro eyeliner -

the most expensive among the tested products.

Berlin - German Chancellor Angela Merkel opposes an expansion of the Group of Eight (G8) to embrace nations such as India and China, her spokesman said Wednesday in Berlin.

"She doesn't see an institutional expansion into a G9, a G12, a G15 and so on as the philosopher's stone," said deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg.

Berlin - Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative political bloc has been given a boost by the government's 480 billion bank (650 billion dollars) rescue plan, a key opinion poll released Wednesday showed.

The weekly Forsa opinion poll, published in Stern magazine and on the RTL television station, showed Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian-based associate party, the Christian Social Union, gained 2 per cent to hit 37 per cent.

Berlin, Oct 22 : A new research by Japanese and German scientists has determined that climate change will have different effects on lakes in warmer and colder regions of the globe.

The research was undertaken by Scientists from Hokkaido University, the Hokkaido Institute of Environmental Sciences, Kagoshima University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), who compared current measurements with measurements taken 70 years ago.

This confirmed a rise in temperatures in the deep water layers of lakes in the south of Japan, while the deep water temperatures of lakes in the north remained the same.

Rising temperatures can lead to changes in nutrient exchange and turnover in the water.

Berlin, Oct 22 : A new study on landscape around Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the US, has determined that imbalance in nitrogen cycle due to the widespread use of fertilizers is damaging water quality and fish populations.

Professor Grace Brush, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, undertook the study of landscape changes around Chesapeake Bay.

Professor Brush studied the organisms and materials preserved in sediments in Chesapeake Bay spanning 1000 to 14,000 years, alongside available historical records covering the past 300 years, to trace the history of changes to nitrogen loading in the estuary.

Berlin, Oct 22: A team of archaeologists, scientists and software programmers has created a 3D virtual model of the city of Cologne as it was 2,000 years ago, which would enable visitors to virtually fly through the city.

According to a report in Spiegel Online, the new computer program will allow the curious to see Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, as it was almost 2,000 years ago, when it was a major northern outpost of the Roman Empire.

“Now, for the first time, people will be able to visualize what an amazing city Cologne already was in antiquity,” said Hansgerd Hellenkemper, the director of the city’s Romano-Germanic Museum.