The Knights Templar, a crusading order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy

Richard Owen, Rome

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said today in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.

The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.

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By Eric Hand

Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have identified five distant galaxy clusters that formed five billion years after the Big Bang. They calculated the mass of the biggest galaxy in each of the clusters and found, to their surprise, that the ancient galaxies were roughly as big as the biggest galaxies in equivalent clusters in today’s Universe.

The ancient galaxies should have been much smaller, at only a fifth of today’s mass, based on galaxy-formation models that predict slow, protracted growth. “That was the reason for the surprise — that it disagrees so radically with what the predictions told us we should be seeing,” says Chris Collins of Liverpool John Moores University in Birkenhead, UK. Collins and his colleagues publish the work today in Nature.

The work suggests that an earlier modelling result may have correctly posited a mechanism — a cold stream of star-nourishing hydrogen gas — by which these first massive galaxies grew so rapaciously. Taken together, the two results suggest that early galaxies grew quickly through injections of gas, rather than slowly through mergers. “We have a whole different story now about how galaxies form,” says Avishai Dekel of the Hebrew University in Israel and first author of the earlier paper.

More at Nature News

Something of the sublime... After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California: Joel Sternfeld/MoMA

In the latest from her series on new photography books, Liz Jobey looks at Into the Sunset, a catalogue depicting America’s enduring love affair with its plains and mountains

By Liz Jobey

Is the American west a place or an idea? This is the question at the heart of an exhibition of photographs that opened last week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of the book that accompanies it. The answer, of course, is both: geographically, it is the part of the United States west of the Mississippi; metaphorically, it is synonymous with freedom, escape, enterprise, individualism and all manner of new starts.

In this, it reflects many qualities that Americans claim as their birthright. From the mid-19th century the belief in “Manifest Destiny” – that it was God’s will that Americans should occupy the country all the way to the Pacific – drove the gradual colonisation from the east, including the driving out of Native Americans and annexing of land for farming, mining, the building of railways and, later, nuclear test sites, military bases and chemical waste dumps. This exhibition looks at how the idea of the west took hold, even as the land that had inspired it was being plundered and destroyed, and suggests that photography has been one of the principal motors of that exchange.

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by Sarah Greenough

He was a foreigner with a camera, a young artist newly arrived on the streets of Manhattan from the Old World, muttering over and again, “What a town, what a town . . .” Robert Frank came from Switzerland in 1947, and he was in America to stay, eager to apply his ideas about art and photography and new ways of seeing.

In a letter to his parents that first year, the photographer marveled: “Only the moment counts, nobody seems to care about what he’ll do tomorrow. . . . Whether you’ve been here for eight days or eight years, you are always treated like an American! There is only one thing you should never do, criticize anything.”

Frank found not only a home in the United States but also his greatest subject. By the end of the 1950s, he had traveled some 10,000 miles of road between the coasts and taken a hard look at the country for a book called “The Americans.” In 83 pictures of grainy black-and-white, he revealed a darkness behind the postwar euphoria, a tension and isolation amid fat American cars and bulging jukeboxes, cowboys and gray flannel suits.

“The Americans” was neither a critique nor a celebration. Frank’s natural interests lay at the margins, showing the new superpower in ashen shades of gray. His utter lack of sentimentality may have been the most shocking thing of all. This wasn’t Life magazine or Norman Rockwell. If there was something familiar about the pictures, it was that their starkness was reminiscent of the way many Americans viewed the Soviet Union, as a dark and inhuman place, marked by drudgery and low expectations.

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The world “liberal” first used in its modern political sense in 1812, when Spaniards wrote a new constitution liberating themselves from monarchical rule. As it happens, the word “socialism” originated in roughly the same period; it came into existence to describe the utopian ideas of the British reformer Robert Owen. Such timing suggests two possibilities: Either the fates of liberalism and socialism are so interlinked that one is all but synonymous with the other–or the two are actually competitors developed to meet similar conditions, in which case victory for one marks the defeat of the other.

These days, one could be forgiven for believing that the former conclusion is correct. It was not so long ago that conservatives were equating liberalism with fascism; today, they have executed a 180-degree swing in order to argue that liberalism is actually synonymous with socialism. “Americans,” proclaimed Republican Senator Jim DeMint at the recent meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, “have gotten a glimpse of the big-government plans of Obama and the Democrats and are ready to stand up, speak out, and, yes, even to take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism.” But it isn’t just the right that has worked itself into a frenzy; on the question of whether we are approaching a new age of socialism, there seems to be remarkable political consensus. In recent weeks, the covers of National Review (“OUR SOCIALIST FUTURE”), The Nation (“REINVENTING CAPITALISM, REIMAGINING SOCIALISM”), and Newsweek (“WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW”) have–respectively–lamented, heralded, and observed the coming rise of socialism.

But all these commentators–right, left, and middle–may want to take a deep breath. We aren’t headed for an era of socialism at all, since socialism is not a natural outgrowth of liberalism. Liberalism is a political philosophy that seeks to extend personal autonomy to as many people as possible, if necessary through positive government action; socialism, by contrast, seeks as much equality as possible, even if doing so curtails individual liberty. These are differences of kind, not degree– differences that have historically placed the two philosophies in direct competition. Today, socialism is on the decline, in large part because liberalism has lately been on the rise. And, if Barack Obama’s version of liberalism succeeds, socialism will be even less popular than it already is.

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by Minxin Pei and Jonathan Anderson

China’s meteoric economic rise has created its share of admirers and its share of detractors, not to mention an equal measure of fear that Beijing may either succeed or fail. Can China harness the strengths of its economy for the good or will its deep societal ills rise to the surface? Pei argues that the effects of severe environmental degradation, an unruly populace and a diseased infrastructure cannot be underestimated. Anderson believes China’s GDP juggernaut will continue going strong. It may even break world records.

Looming Stagnation by Minxin Pei

FORECASTERS OF the fortunes of nations are no different from Wall Street analysts: they all rely on the past to predict the future. So it is no surprise that China’s rapid economic growth in the last thirty years has led many to believe that the country will be able to continue to grow at this astounding rate for another two to three decades. Optimism about China’s future is justified by the state’s apparently strong economic fundamentals—such as a high savings rate, a large and increasingly integrated domestic market, urbanization and deep integration into the global trading system. More important, China has achieved its stunning performance in spite of the many daunting economic, social and political difficulties that doomsayers have pointed to as insurmountable obstacles to sustainable growth in the past. With such a record of effective problem solving, it is hard to believe that China will not continue its economic rise.

Yet, while China may sustain its growth for another two to three decades and vindicate the optimists, there are equally strong odds that its growth will fizzle. China’s economic performance could be undermined by the persistent flaws in its economic institutions and structure that are the result of half-finished and misguided government policies. A vicious circle exists in which the Communist Party’s survival is predicated on the neglect of fundamental aspects of society’s welfare in favor of short-term economic growth. And many of the same social, economic and political risk factors the government has thus far sidestepped—heavily subsidized industries, growing inequality, poor use of labor—remain. Some are becoming worse.

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Neuroscientists are exploring how brain and body make sense of our most ephemeral resource.
By Melissa Healy

In a healthy human brain, researchers believe that every second we are conscious, a circuit involving three distinct regions of the brain — the cerebellum, basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex — is essentially checking and cross-checking incoming information and its time stamp. In real time, that circuit builds a logical sequence of events out of information coming from different sources at different speeds.

From our earliest days, this circuit helps us to infer relationships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. A baby bats at a dangling toy clown, feels its soft covering hit her hand and, less than a second later, hears it jingle: By correctly perceiving the order of those events and the tiny space of time between them, she learns that her action caused the clown to swing and jingle. And in so doing, she learns she can do it again.

When this sense of time is disrupted — as in several illnesses now under study — the world can become a chaotic jumble of seemingly unrelated events, or of effects attributed to the wrong cause. Chronically taken by surprise in an illogical world, a patient with what’s increasingly known as a “temporal disorder” might respond with irrational anger or fear. Or he may feel helpless to understand how his actions affect things and people around him, and lapse into apathy.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, suggests that such dysfunctions of timing may underlie what he calls the “fragmented cognition of schizophrenia.” Schizophrenic patients, Eagleman says, are recognized as having spotty powers of time estimation — sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.

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If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace?

by Philip Delves Broughton

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paul-son, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”

It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.

Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes.

In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.

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By Phil Berardelli

Astronomers have, for the first time, discovered what seems to be a binary set of supermassive black holes. The galactic beasts are orbiting each other about every 100 years, and ultimately they will collide with enough force to trip gravitational-wave detectors on Earth.

Spotting a single supermassive black hole is fairly easy, so much so that astronomers are convinced that one lurks in the center of just about every galaxy. Finding two supermassives locked in a binary orbit is another story. Only about as big as a solar system–though they can weigh as much as a billion suns–spotting them as distinct objects is as difficult as finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

But that’s what a pair of astronomers from the National Optical Astronomical Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, appear to have done. Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer were combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collection of images and spectral information on hundreds of thousands of galaxies, when their software flagged a quasar whose light characteristics differed significantly from the rest of the sample. Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe, and their brightness is thought to be caused by the energy from supermassive black holes consuming tremendous amounts of surrounding gas and dust.

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By ERIC JAGER

When I tell people that the five years I spent researching and writing my last book included about a month and a half of work in the French national archives, they often look skeptical or even laugh, saying, “Right, research in France. That sounds really tough.” Sometimes they pantomime the copious drinking of wine. Or they ask why anyone needs to go to the archives at all, since everything is now on the Internet.

Actually there’s a lot that isn’t on the Internet. And once you fly across the ocean in a cramped economy seat, arrive in Paris with your luggage and research notes, locate your rented apartment, renew your pass at the archives, secure a numbered spot in the crowded manuscripts room, find your documents in the catalogs, carefully write the shelf marks (call numbers) on the neat little forms provided for that purpose, and stand in line to hand your requests to the harried or indifferent clerk at the call desk — your work has only begun.

As you wait for your documents to arrive at the desk, or to be delivered to your table from a metal cart rolled noisily through the room, you hope and pray that the precious records are available and that the curatorial staff can find them. If so, you have been liberated — or doomed — to spend days or even weeks copying faded, nearly illegible texts and deciphering them from medieval Latin, French, or the like. Many archives forbid photography, and you often have only ambient light, so a magnifying glass comes in handy. It’s time-consuming, eye-straining detective work, punctuated by the occasional thrill of an unanticipated revelation.

Several years ago I was trying to find an elusive document that I felt might help me solve the mystery of a story I was researching. The story culminated in a celebrated trial by combat — a duel to the death — fought before the French king in 1386 by two Norman nobles, Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. The fellow courtiers had once been close friends, until Le Gris acquired a piece of land that Carrouges coveted. Their falling-out led to accusations and even lawsuits, until finally Carrouges charged that Le Gris had raped his beautiful young wife, Marguerite. The case deadlocked in the Parlement of Paris, the nation’s high court, which eventually authorized a judicial duel — something it had not done for 30 years and would never do again.

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