STRIPED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY. In high-temperature ceramic superconductors, currents flow mostly in the plane. But if special dopants (such as neodymium) are added to La-Sr-Cu-O materials, the supercurrents seem to be further restricted to narrow lanes or stripes. In these materials rows of charges are separated by insulating antiferromagnetic regions (in which neighboring atomic spins oppose each other), so they are referred to as charge-ordered or spin-ordered materials. Since the stripes occur preferentially at lower temperatures, physicists are not sure whether the stripes help or hurt superconductivity. Two new experiments (in which the superconductivity is turned off, the better to study underlying electronic properties) add some fresh perspective. A University of Tokyo team (Noda et al.) uses a strong magnetic field to produce a Hall effect, in which electrons should be pushed sideways by the field. A resistance to this effect is taken as evidence for a "self-organized" one-dimensional charge flow. Meanwhile a Stanford-LBL-Tokyo team (Zhou et al.) shoots UV photons into their samples and observe the ejected electrons that come flying out. The telltale photo-electron pattern maps back to charge flows in the sample that must have been organized into stripes. (Both articles appear in Science, 8 Oct.)