Strange bedfellows inside a superconductor

The discovery of superconducting cuprates in 1986 is considered a watershed moment in the study of superconductivity—not only because of their high superconducting temperatures (TC’s) but also on account of their highly exotic properties, which are still largely enigmatic (1). On page 1506 of this issue, Wahlberg et al. (2) bring insights into the intriguing physics of cuprates’ nonsuperconducting state by connecting two widely studied phenomena previously believed to be completely independent of each other: the linear resistivity of the strange metallic phase and charge density waves (CDWs).