Time and distance constraints on accelerating cosmological models
  The absence of guidance from fundamental physics about the mechanism behind
cosmic acceleration has given rise to a number of alternative cosmological
scenarios. These are based either on modifications of general relativistic
gravitation theory on large scales or on the existence of new fields in Nature.
In this paper we investigate the observational viability of some accelerating
cosmological models in light of 32 age measurements of passively evolving
galaxies as a function of redshift and recent estimates of the product of the
cosmic microwave background acoustic scale and the baryonic acoustic
oscillation peak scale. By using information-criteria model selection, we
select the best-fit models and rank the alternative scenarios. We show that
some of these models may provide a better fit to the data than does the current
standard cosmological constant dominated ($\Lambda$CDM) model.
