Whilst idly browsing the Internet tonight I followed a link to News of the Universe. I don't know what kind of news I expected to get - something quite important I suppose - but this is the sort of thing I found:

Figure 13 showing the limits on the dark energy equation of state shows w(z) = w0 +wa(1-a) with (w0, wa) = (-1.7,3) as being within the 1 sigma contour. But this combination gives a dark energy density much larger than the matter density at last scattering.

Well, that's certainly news to me.

I was drawn to an entry entitled 'Egg-shaped Universe?'. It seems that despite the best efforts of some brainy boffin to convince us that the Universe is indeed egg-shaped, it is not. I'd quite like the Universe to be egg-shaped, but have always assumed that it is infinite, which, according to my peculiar way of thinking, would preclude it from having any shape at all. But I'm not an expert. Anyway, the reason the Universe is probably not egg-shaped is this:

Adding an additional quadrupole from the ellipsoidal Universe will make the probability of the low observed quadrupole even smaller, unless there is a reason that the quadrupole from the ellipticity will be equal and nearly opposite to the quadrupole from inflation.

But you knew that already.