Munich - Several of the main beer tents at Oktoberfest in Munich were declared full, with no one else allowed in, just before the annual event was ceremonially opened on Saturday.

Performing one of the great rituals required of the mayor of Munich, Christian Ude plunged a tap into the first barrel of beer on the stroke of noon, poured a stein of ale for waiting Bavarian Premier Guenther Beckstein and declared the fest open.

Munich, September 20 : New, very precise measurements, taken by the ESO (European Southern Observatory) instrument HARPS, have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought.

A remarkable result from HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent ‘fall’ of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves.

The result was obtained by a group of astrophysicists led by Nicolas Nardetto.

Since Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery of their unique properties in 1912, the class of bright, pulsating stars known as Cepheids has been used as a distance indicator.

Munich - Two more German public banks, Bayern LB and NRW Bank, disclosed Friday they were exposed by the collapse this week of US investment bank Lehman Brothers.

The admissions came a day after a federally controlled German bank KfW said its exposure to Monday's Lehman failure totalled 536 million euros (772 million dollars).

In a letter to staff obtained by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Munich-based Bayern LB, which is controlled by Bavaria state, put its risk at up to 300 million euros (432 million dollars).

Munich - The timing belt is one of the essential car parts that has to be replaced regularly and motorists are advised to strictly conform to the recommendations listed in the owners manual, according to Germany's automobile association ADAC. Most car makers list a certain amount of kilometres or the age of the vehicle when the timing belt needs replacement.

Munich, September 9 : Using ESO’s (European Southern Observatory’s) Very Large Telescope, astronomers have been able to study planet-forming discs around young Sun-like stars in unsurpassed detail, clearly revealing the motion and distribution of the gas in the inner parts of the disc, which implies the presence of giant planets.

Planets could be home to other forms of life, so the study of exoplanets ranks very high in contemporary astronomy.

More than 300 planets are already known to orbit stars other than the Sun, and these new worlds show an amazing diversity in their characteristics.

Munich, September 3 : The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Wide Field Imager has captured the intricate swirls of a spiral galaxy, which is a smaller look-alike of our own Milky Way.

Shining with the light of billions of stars and the ruby red glow of hydrogen gas, it is a beautiful example of a barred spiral galaxy, whose shape has led to it being nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, though it is officially known as Messier 83.

The dramatic image of the galaxy Messier 83 was captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, located high in the dry desert mountains of the Chilean Atacama Desert.