Dear Reader,

The ever quickening pace of modern life has crammed our world with the technological wonders that make modern life possible.

Satellites, DNA and polyphonic ring tones - all unthinkable only a century before - are now as much a part of life as chimney sweeps and rickets were just a hundred years ago.

Science continues to enrich our lives with its labour saving devices - enabling us to do even more things in less time than it used to take us to do just half as much, or even less.

Couple this with the increasing popularity of flexible working hours and voluntary redundancy and there's no doubt at all that we have a lot more time on our hands these days!

But what about space? Now that's a different story.

Whether you're a London motorist vainly seeking that ever elusive parking space or a Tokyo parent struggling to bring up three children in an appartment the size of a wheelie bin, the facts are clear:

We could all use a bit more of that, please!

That's why today's announcement from the eggheads at Greenwich is so exciting.

Put simply, a recalculation of the Hubble constant (the number that tells boffins how much sky there is) has resulted in the surprising discovery that the universe is approximately 1.205* times bigger than previously thought -

THAT'S OVER 20% MORE SPACE - ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Needless to say, this revelation has taken the astronomical community by its knees. Professor Saul Eggs, the uncompromisingly bald head of astrophysics at Dronfield University, spoke for every scientist on the planet when he described his reaction:

"I were gobsmacked" he told us.

But it's not just bespectacled geniuses in white coats who have cause to celebrate today's discovery.

Every man (or her) in the street can now take comfort in the fact that the oft sought after "little bit of extra space" is now right at the place where they always needed:

"Beneath our very noses".