Physics "News": Solid State Edition

I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about new developments in the study of solid state systems:

  • "Are Doubly Charged Particles Lurking in High-T Superconductors?": I don't know. Are they? Exactly what mechanism leads to electron pairing and superconductivity in the high-temperature ceramic superconductors remains a mystery, and this reports on a new suggestion that it's the result of a new particle that "would be distinct from a Cooper pair, the charge carrier in a superconductor. The new particle would be a boson that carries twice the charge of an electron, but is not made out of elementary excitations." I'm not entirely sure what that means, which is why I haven't posted about it before.
  • "Supersolid saga continues": Seriously, guys, this is starting to get old.
  • The hot system of the moment in solid state systems seems to be "graphene," which is basically a single-atom sheet of graphite-- a single sheet of carbon atoms in a planar arrangement. There have been a zillion graphene stories in the last few months, of which I flagged two: "Graphene p-n junction unveiled" and "Graphene oxide weaved into 'paper'". They're pretty much what they sound like from the titles.
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A big step in improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells in on the horizon. A paper published over the weekend in Nature Physics describes the ability of a substance called Graphene to convert a high percentage of the energy from sunlight into electricity.
Last week's Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I'll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off.
There are fewer of them this time, so I'll keep them above the fold.
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array.

So is it correct that you have to be a member of the "Institute of Physics" to read these physicsworld.com articles?