Earlier this month, a free repository at Cornell University for technical papers that has become a wire service of sorts for physicists, mathematicians and other disciplines, named ArXiv, marked a major milestone as the number of papers collected there reached the half-million mark. ArXiv serves as the main forum for scientists in many fields to present and discuss the latest findings before their pre-publication papers are accepted by a journal.

An example: Grigori Perelman, who devised a proof for the Poincaré conjecture, a 100-year-old problem in mathematics, never submitted his solution to any academic journal. In 2002, he posted the first of a series of papers that contained a proof for the topology problem on ArXiv. Science magazine later named the work “breakthrough of the year” and Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics, which the quirky Russian refused.

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Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned.

Open access is the movement, recently bolstered by Congress, to make studies available for free online, instead of charging taxpayers who funded the research (and others) to read them. Many prominent scientists have backed it, signing on with BioMed Central and a non-profit open access publisher, the Public Library of Science.

BioMed Central publisher Matthew Cockerill announced the news in an email today to editors of BMC's journals.

Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change. But Cockerill assured editors that a BMC board of trustees "will continue to safeguard BioMed Central's open access policy in the future." Springer "has been notable...for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing," Cockerill said in a release circulated with the email to editors.

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Three men who study broken symmetry -- the phenomenon that "conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface," according to the Nobel Foundation -- have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago; Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.

Broken symmetry has become an important underpinning of particle physics. You can read more about Kobayashi and Maskawa's work here.

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The U.S. has a decidedly ambivalent relationship with alternative medicine, though large numbers of Americans routinely ingest nostrums from ginkgo to garlic.  In Bolivia, by contrast, the status of holistic medicine has risen at even the highest levels of government. President Evo Morales is such a strong advocate that he recently launched a campaign to encourage its use by his countrymen, a majority of whom have neither the insurance nor the cash to pay for conventional health care.

Morales's pitch includes the appointment of a curandero (holistic healer), Emiliano Cusi, as his vice minister of medicine. Cusi plans to set up a national registry of practitioners and establish “cottage pharmacies” consisting of herbalists trained to make natural remedies in their homes, which they sell and distribute to hospitals.

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Parents worried about teens' safety (not to mention the safety of everyone else on the road) when they take the new car for a spin will soon be able to control how fast the kids drive and how loudly they crank up the tunes. They will also be able to remotely nag  their young drivers to wear their seatbelts, all thanks to a new technology called MyKey that Ford Motor Company plans to introduce as standard equipment on its 2010 Focus coupe and, down the road, in its Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models.

MyKey has a transponder chip that, once plugged into the ignition, allows car owners to program their car's computer. This includes setting the car's maximum speed limit as high as 80 miles per hour, and to issue warning chimes when the car's speed reaches 45, 55 or 65 miles per hour. Although a driver can still do a lot of damage at 80 miles per hour, and it exceeds most speed limits, this speed does allow for more maneuverability during highway driving (particularly if a driver needs to pass the car ahead). The MyKey can also program the car to chime a six-second seatbelt reminder every minute for five minutes and, after that, to mute the car stereo until the driver buckles up. Plus, MyKey can program the stereo to keep it down to no more than 40 percent of full volume.

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Harald zur Hausen, a German scientist who linked human papilloma virus (HPV) to cervical cancer, shares this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

zur Hausen's work paved the way for Merck's vaccine Gardasil.

Notably, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nobels did not recognize Robert Gallo for his role in the discovery of HIV.

For more on the prizes, read the official Nobel Foundation announcement here and check back for our ongoing coverage, including today's 60-Second Science podcast.

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What if the people who run the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) threw a party, and no particles came?

That’s what  is set to happen on October 21, when CERN plans an inauguration ceremony for the supercollider. After a much-ballyhooed first proton beam run on September 10, the LHC won’t actually be operational until next year, thanks to a few early mishaps. Not exactly the results LHC operators were hoping for – but why let a little thing like failure get in the way of celebrating?

A press release announcing the ceremony stressed the positive:

“It’s remarkable how quickly the LHC went through its paces on 10 September,” LHC project leader Lyn Evans said, “and testimony to the rigorous preparation that has gone into building and commissioning the LHC.”

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TROY, N.Y.—Eight years and $200 million in the making, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) made its debut today on the school's campus here. RPI is billing the EMPAC as a place where artists, visiting scholars, researchers, engineers and designers can explore how their disciplines intersect and use the center's large video screens and super-computer hookup to create immersive, interactive presentations.

RPI president Shirley Ann Jackson called the EMPAC a "balance between left and right brain endeavors" during the center's opening ceremonies and likened the project to a particle accelerator, "an eruption, if you will, of discovery and transformation."

Peter Schwartz, founder and chairman of the San Francisco business consulting firm Global Business Network and a 1968 RPI graduate, noted at the festivities that RPI has come a long way since he was a student, when "art was a thing that was quite peripheral to our lives," he said.

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Last night's debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin showcased their differences on energy policy and climate change, and also reminded us of some intra-ticket differences on those key scientific issues.

Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, reiterated that she does not believe that global warming was solely caused by humans, a softer stance than that of running mate John McCain as well as that of the International Panel on Climate Change, which determined that it is "very likely" man-made. As Palin told Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News earlier in the week, climate change is a problem, but people are not the only culprits.

"I'm not one to attribute every man — activity of man -- to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet," she said last night. "But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?"

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More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. are living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as more people are infected with the AIDS-causing virus than die from it each year.

The new estimate, published in today's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, is based on reports of HIV cases from 40 states and cases of AIDS from 10 states and the District of Columbia in 2006. It is about the same as the previous estimate from 2003, which calculated that between 1 million and 1.2 million people were living with HIV.

But the 2003 estimate may have been an overstatement, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemiologists write. This time, they worked with a refined statistical method that includes more reliable counts of HIV infections from more states. Prior to April of this year, not all states tracked HIV the same way, making it difficult for epidemiologists to get a handle on its national impact.

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