Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Current theories suggest that W and Z bosons acquire mass from interactions with the Higgs scalar field, but a new study suggests that the higher dimensional structure of spacetime could be the actual cause. This complicated and unseen structure of spacetime could potentially explain some of the outstanding questions about the accelerating expansion of the universe. This is a well-explored theory of how mass arises in the universe, but some still consider the idea of a universal field to be an “ad hoc” assumption. The results of the study were published in the journal Nuclear Physics B . With the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the idea of a Higgs scalar field is a strong theory in the standard model.