 Meet John Scott Russell. The year is 1834, and he knows he's on the verge of an important scientific discovery because that wave he's chasing hasn't changed shape or lost any momentum for over a mile. What he doesn't know is that this solitary wave will launch a new branch of physics that today has scientists taking up the same pursuit. Only now, the waves are millions of times smaller and magnetic. And as one joint research team from Japan and China has proposed, they could give rise to the ultimate computer. Dubbed skirmjons, these magnetic whirlpools possess many properties considered ideal for carrying digital information. Like Russell's wave, skirmjons keep their shape almost indefinitely. In a computer, this stability would make bits extremely difficult to erase. In addition, skirmjons could be ten times smaller than the magnetic bits found in today's hard drives and would require much less energy to be written into a computer's memory. That means that a skirmjon-based computer would be able to store more data and generate a lot less heat during operation. Scientists have already figured out how to use skirmjons to store data, but creating a way for the magnetic vortices to do computer processing has been more challenging. To address this problem, the research team designed nanosized channels that exploit the fundamental properties of skirmjons to carry out basic computer functions. The dimensions of the channels set the rules for how skirmjons are created or destroyed. A thin channel recreates a skirmjon, whereas a wide channel delivers a skirmjon to its destruction. And as a side effect of their shape-preserving tendency, one skirmjon can be split into two, or two can be merged into one. The team combined these basic elements into circuits that perform the and and or operations fundamental to computing, which answer the questions, are all inputs one, and is any input one. More research is required to implement this design in practice. But the work, which all started with a single wave, may be an important step towards making a skirmjonic computer a reality.