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What if Dark Energy Was Once Negative? Scientists Uncover a Surprising New Possibility

A gravity model that lets dark energy change sign could help resolve a persistent disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding.

In an existing theory of gravity, the same present-day matter density can fit two very different histories of the universe. Researchers had largely pursued the one that kept dark energy’s density positive. Exploring the other has now revealed a possible history in which that density began below zero and turned positive billions of years later.

Dark energy is the mysterious ingredient believed to drive the universe’s accelerating expansion. The simplest explanation treats it as unchanged throughout cosmic history. In the new analysis, however, the effects attributed to dark energy arise from a modified description of gravity. Its density is an effective quantity derived from the gravitational equations, rather than a property of a newly introduced substance.

Ruby Fixes Three Regex Engine Bugs Responsible for Four Critical GitLab RCE Flaws

GitLab.com already runs the patched version, and GitLab Dedicated tenants on recent internal releases need no action, GitLab said. Because GitLab bundles its own copy of Ruby and patched it there, installing one of these fixed versions applies the fix.

GitLab also published detection rules that self-managed administrators can use to look for signs of exploitation attempts.

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Research shows how the brain merges faces and voices to read emotions

Communicating effectively with others involves recognizing emotions from faces and voices. How does the brain process and integrate emotional information from visuals and sounds that others display? New in JNeurosci, Olivier Collignon, from the Catholic University of Louvain, Stefania Mattioni, currently at Ghent University, and colleagues mapped responses in people’s brains to faces and voices expressing different emotions.

When participants perceived faces or voices separately, the emotions that were expressed triggered a wide range of brain activity in areas that respond to faces and voices. Mattioni elaborates, “Importantly, these areas were not limited to their preferred sense: Several face-selective regions also carried information about emotions heard in voices, while voice-selective regions carried information about emotions seen in faces. In some regions, the brain even represented the same emotion similarly whether it was seen or heard.” When study participants observed faces and voices together, this combination reshaped how the brain processed and evaluated emotions compared to faces or voices alone.

According to the researchers, this work suggests that the brain systems that process faces and voices interact and, in some areas, represent emotions in a similar way. This observation may help people quickly build an understanding of how a person is feeling by looking at their facial expressions and hearing the tone of their voice. The findings from this study could inform future research on whether these mechanisms are impaired in individuals who struggle to integrate social cues.