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MESA, AZ — Mysterious lights hovering above the east Valley have many wondering if we’ve had a close encounter.

“It was pretty bright, it was about straight up over here, and it went straight that way, stopped, and it didn’t seem like it was too far,” said DJ Maier and Kerri Burnett, describing what they saw.

The couple says they spotted the phenomenon outside their Mesa home on Sunday around nine that night.

Exactly why magic mushrooms go blue when cut was something of a chemical puzzle.

Why do magic mushrooms turn blue when they are cut? Chemists have now unravelled this decade-old mystery, in the process revealing that the dark blue pigments at the centre of the mystery are similar to indigo, the dye used to produce blue jeans.

The Star Trek Blueprints (or Booklet of General Plans) are a detailed “Complete Set of 12 Authentic Blueprints” (sized 9-by-30 inches) of the USS Constitution (NCC-1700), a ship of the same class as the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). (The cover claims the blueprints are “of the Fabulous Starship Enterprise”.)

One of the nice things about a road trip is you often get to see something that really surprises you. A recent trip through Texas may have resulted in my second most surprising sighting. There’s a strange tower that looks oddly like a Tesla tower in the middle of rural Texas, right off the main interstate. What is it? Although Google did answer the question — sort of — I’m still not sure how legitimate its stated purpose is.

First Sighting

I was driving between Wimberly and Frisco — two towns that aren’t exactly household names outside of Texas. Near Milford, there’s a very tall structure that looks like a giant mechanical mushroom on top of a grain silo. If the mushroom were inverted or pointing towards the horizon, it would be easy to imagine it was some very odd antenna. This dish, however, is pointed right down its own odd-shaped mast. The top of the thing sure looks like the top of a Van de Graf generator.

A simple experiment, suitable for performing in an undergraduate physics laboratory, illustrates electromagnetic induction through the water entering into a cylindrical rubber tube by detecting the voltage developed across the tube in the direction transverse both to the flow velocity and to the magnetic field. The apparatus is a very simple example of an electromagnetic flowmeter, a device which is commonly used both in industrial and physiological techniques. The phenomenology observed is similar to that of the Hall effect in the absence of an electric current in the direction of motion of the carriers. The experimental results show a dependence on the intensity of the magnetic field and on the carrier velocity, in good agreement with the theory. Discussion of the system, based on classical electromagnetism, indicates that the effect depends only on the flow rate, and is independent both of the velocity profile and of the electrical conductivity of the medium.

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The applications of spin dynamos, which could potentially power complex nanoscopic devices, have so far been limited owing to their extremely low energy conversion efficiencies. Here, we present a unique plasmonic diabolo cavity (PDC) that dramatically improves the spin rectification signal (enhancement of more than three orders of magnitude) under microwave excitation; further, it enables an energy conversion efficiency of up to ~0.69 mV/mW, compared with ~0.27 μV/mW without a PDC. This remarkable improvement arises from the simultaneous enhancement of the microwave electric field (~13-fold) and the magnetic field (~195-fold), which cooperate in the spin precession process generates photovoltage (PV) efficiently under ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) conditions. The interplay of the microwave electromagnetic resonance and the ferromagnetic resonance originates from a hybridized mode based on the plasmonic resonance of the diabolo structure and Fabry-Perot-like modes in the PDC. Our work sheds light on how more efficient spin dynamo devices for practical applications could be realized and paves the way for future studies utilizing both artificial and natural magnetism for applications in many disciplines, such as for the design of future efficient wireless energy conversion devices, high frequent resonant spintronic devices, and magnonic metamaterials.

In 2007, Y. S. Gui, et al.1 first proposed and demonstrated the spin dynamo, first proposed and demonstrated the spin dynamo, is constructed that provides a new and interesting way to generate direct current via spin precessions to locally power nanoscopic devices and for future applications such as wireless energy conversion. Compared with the spin-driven currents in semiconductors2, spin dynamos are based on ferromagnetic materials1 or spin-torque diodes3, 4, which feature a much higher current/power ratio coupled with a much smaller internal resistance. However, the reported works are limited to sophisticated waveguide couplings (and therefore to wires), such as coplanar waveguides (CPWs)5, 6, microstrip lines7, 8, and bias Tees3, 9 12, to in-couple radio-frequency or microwave electromagnetic waves. Free space direct illumination has rarely been studied, despite its excellent suitability for wireless energy conversion.