  We review the cosmological implications of a relic population of pseudo
Nambu-Goldstone bosons (pNGB) with an anomalous coupling to two photons, often
called axion-like particles (ALPs). We establish constraints on the pNGB mass
and two-photon coupling by considering big bang nucleosynthesis, the physics of
the cosmic microwave background, and the diffuse photon background. The bounds
from WMAP7 and other large-scale-structure data on the effective number of
neutrino species can be stronger than the traditional bounds from the
primordial helium abundance. These bounds, together with those from primordial
deuterium abundance, constitute the most stringent probes of early decays.
