The Shroud of Turin

A linen cloth over four metres long bearing the image of a man, kept in the cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin since 1578. Its first documentary appearance is at Lirey in France around 1355, and already then the bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, wrote to the pope that the artist who made it had confessed. In 1988 a sample was cut from the cloth and divided between three independent laboratories — Oxford, Zurich and Arizona — blind, with control fabrics. All three returned the same interval: 1260 to 1390. The result was published in Nature. The Catholic Church has never declared the shroud a genuine relic and describes it as an icon for veneration.

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Clever Hans

The residential inner courtyard at 10 Griebenowstraße in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany. At the turn of the 20th century, this urban setting hosted public demonstrations of the Orlov Trotter stallion known as Clever Hans (Der Kluge Hans). The horse's apparent mastery of arithmetic and human language captivated international audiences, revolutionized animal cognition research, and led to the discovery of the observer-expectancy effect ("Clever Hans effect").