Skyrmions—tiny magnetic whirls that appear in certain combinations of materials—are considered promising information carriers for future data storage. A research team from RWTH Aachen University, Kiel University, and the University of Iceland has discovered that these magnetic nano-knots untie themselves in two distinct ways. Using a magnetic field, the probability to succeed in untying can be varied by up to a factor of 10,000. This insight might be groundbreaking for future information processing with skyrmions. The research has now been published in Nature Physics.