A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

As one of the few astrophysical events that most people are familiar with, the Big Bang has a special place in our culture. And while there is scientific consensus that it is the best explanation for the origin of the Universe, the debate is far from closed. However, it's hard to find alternative models of the Universe without a beginning that are genuinely compelling.

That could change now with the fascinating work of Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Shu has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which the roles of time space and mass are related in new kind of relativity.

Shu's idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.

So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts.

Bioengineered humans are people who have been biologically upgraded through machine implants, genetic manipulation and drugs. Together, they herald what is popularly known as the coming post-human or Human 2.0 era. Augmentation is any bodily intervention that enhances human function and was not initiated because of a pathological deficiency. The only area where elective augmentation is obvious in everyday life is in cosmetic surgery such as veneers and drugs that enhance human capability and endurance like Viagra.

Biomimicry and bio-enhancement are becoming far more sophisticated. Scientists can now grow new organs in the lab, for example, and 3D bioprinters where they can be printed are being developed by companies like Organovo. However, the incentive to augment the physical strength of the human body is something that most of us don't care about deeply on a daily basis. "I don't need to run faster. I have a car," said a friend when we proposed the advantages of having a robotic foot. Running faster, X-ray vision, hearing at frequencies that only wolves and dogs can hear, having photogenic memory: all this sounds good but none of us would spend the time or money to acquire them because the advantages are not immediately clear. Unlike plastic surgery, which makes us immediately more attractive to the opposite sex, it is unclear what a new kidney would afford me if my current one functions reasonably well.

Of course, there are a number of reasons why we would want to invest in bio-enhancements, such as living longer with loved ones and eliminating susceptibility to malaria in Africa. But the private sector will not pay for the high cost of research based on these lofty goals and the government is already crumbling under debt and budget constraints. Human 2.0 would likely be a pipe dream if it wasn't for one group which is always looking for a superior human: the army.

In the second week of July, nearly 50 students in Tamil Nadu were caught submitting bogus marksheets for college admissions, blowing the lid off a coordinated, state-wide fake marksheet scam. The modus operandi of the forgers, it was discovered, involved the simple use of blank marksheets pilfered from university offices, desktop scanners and a piece of software called Adobe Photoshop. A week later, halfway across the world, energy company BP Plc admitted after an online firestorm that it had digitally altered or "photoshopped" some of the images released to show the company's response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The landmark image editing program celebrates 20 years since its first release in June 1990, and its appearance in recent news is perhaps unfair to its legacy and importance in the world of photography and digital design. It's among the few hallowed pieces of technology to have its own verb, and it has democratized professional photo-editing on the Internet (bloggers spotted BP's Photoshop faux pas, not image analysis experts). Its ubiquity, however, has led us to an interesting question: Where does one draw the line between digital "improvement" and "manipulation"? "When I look at a picture I like to ask myself the question, is that real? If I can't tell, then the person either took a phenomenal photo or did a fantastic job in Photoshop," says Terry White, worldwide evangelist for Photoshop developers Adobe.

China has topped the list of the world's major polluters of the near-Earth space environment, followed by the United States and Russia, the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said on Friday.

All together, the three main space powers produce 93% of space debris, according to a statement published on the agency's website.

"According to estimates, 40% of space debris is produced by China. The U.S.'s share accounts for 27.5%, and Russia's [share] for 25.5%, with 7% falling on other countries involved in space exploration," the statement said.

The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has named Russia and CIS countries as the main polluters of outer space. According to the organization, Russia and its former Soviet allies disposed of a total of 5,833 spacecraft or their parts, including 1,402 satellites and 4,431 parts of carrier rockets, by ejecting them into near-Earth space.

An American man has found after a 27-year-search the wreckage of a Second World War bomber in which his air force pilot cousin was killed.

Gerald Landry, 73, spent the best part of three decades looking for the bomber pilot shot down by the Luftwaffe in December 1944.

Now, in a remarkable discovery, artefacts recovered from the bottom of the Adriatic Sea near Croatia could confirm the death of First Lt Russell Landry.

Lt Landry was part of an 800-strong force of Allied fighter pilots sent to bomb oil refineries in Blechhammer and Odertal, Germany.

However, Luftwaffe fighters supporting the German army at the Battle of the Bulge fended off the attack, shooting down 22 planes in just ten minutes.

Newly-discovered 318-million year old animal tracks in Canada have confirmed the long-held theory that reptiles were the first vertebrates to thrive in Earth's arid inland environments.

The tracks provide evidence for a key point in the history of life. They were formed during the period that saw the emergence of the first animals to lay hard-shelled eggs - a key feature of the reptiles' success.

A team of UK and Canadian researchers found the footprints in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada - by a mixture of luck and accident.

'We were looking for plant fossils in a remote location scattered with sandstone boulders,' says Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research team. 'I tripped over one of the boulders and saw all these wonderful trackways over the surface.'

Noah Shachtman reports at Wired Danger Room blog that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are together backing a firm that monitors the web in real time, and claims to use that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

Steering clear of crocodiles and navigating around massive submerged trees, a team of divers began mapping some of the 25 freshwater pools of Cara Blanca, Belize, which were important to the ancient Maya. In three weeks this May, the divers found fossilized animal remains, bits of pottery and - in the largest pool explored - an enormous underwater cave.

This project, led by University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero and funded by the National Geographic Society and an Arnold O. Beckman Award, was the first of what Lucero hopes will be a series of dives into the pools of the southern Maya lowlands in central Belize.

The divers will return this summer to assess whether archaeological excavation is even possible at the bottom of the pools, some of which are more than 60 meters deep.

"We don't know if it's going to be feasible to conduct archaeology 200 feet below the surface," Lucero said. "But they are going to try."

The new movie Agora chronicles the life, challenges and death of Hypatia, a 4th Century woman astronomer whose contribution influenced and shaped modern science and our understanding of the world and the universe. Mabel Armstrong, author of the award-winning book Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars, tells Hypatia's story with the joy that a great science teacher (which she was) can bring to an old subject.

When Hypatia was born, her father, Theon, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy in Alexandria. He believed, as many Greeks did, that it was possible to raise a perfect human being. So he gave his daughter the best possible education, including studies in mathematics, languages, rhetoric, and natural philosophy-or science.

Upper-class women of the time were usually secluded, expected to devote themselves solely to their husband and children, but Hypatia found a job at the most famous institution in the ancient world, the library at Alexandria. She taught mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and wrote many books about these subjects-thirteen books on algebra, her favorite subject, and another eight books on geometry.

Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been found over the past decade and a half, most of them solitary worlds orbiting their parent star in seeming isolation. With further observation, however, one in three of these systems have been found to have two or more planets.

Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other's gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.

Now, however, John A. Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and his colleagues have found two systems with pairs of gas giant planets locked in an orbital embrace.

In one system-a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth-the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen. "This new planet pair came in an unexpected package," says Johnson.

Adds Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville, "A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be destroyed quickly if the planets weren't doing such a well synchronized dance. This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm."