A claimed detection of the MRI in a spherical shell experiment (Sisan et al., 2004), in which the underlying state was itself turbulent, awaits confirmation at the time of this writing (2009). A magnetic instability that bears some similarity to the MRI can be excited if both vertical and azimuthal magnetic fields are present in the undisturbed state (Hollerbach and Rüdiger, 2005). This is sometimes referred to as the "helical-MRI," (Liu et al., 2006) though its precise relation to the MRI described above has yet to be fully elucidated. Because it is less sensitive to stabilizing ohmic resistance than is the classical MRI, this helical magnetic instability is easier to excite in the laboratory, and there are indications that it may have been found (Stefani et al., 2006). The detection of the classical MRI in a hydrodynamically quiescent background state has yet to be achieved in the laboratory, however.