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Shroud of Turin
The Shroud of Turin
The Shroud of Turin is a long cloth with front and back images of a man who appears to have been scourged and crucified. The Shroud is stored in St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, Italy. The cloth is linen. It is a single piece, measuring about 14 feet by 3½ feet. The weave is a 3-over-1 herringbone twill. It was made on a hand loom. The cloth is approximately 350 micrometers. The thickness varies between 315 and 390 micrometers. The yarn (thread) of the cloth consists of approximately 70 to 120 flax fibers twisted together in a Z-twist (clockwise). The various lengths, or hanks, of yarn are not spliced together but layered side-by-side during the weaving. Variegated patterns of colors in both the warp and weft yarn indicate that the yarn was bleached before weaving rather than after the cloth was taken from the loom. The thickness of the fibers from flax plants varies significantly as they do in the yarn of the Shroud. The average thickness of Shroud's fibers is about 13 micrometers or 13,000 nanometers. By comparison, typical human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick. There is an evaporation concentration layer of starch fractions on the outermost fibers of the yarn. This coating is about 1 percent to 4 percent of the thickness of the fibers. In other words, the evaporation concentration, is no more than about 1/100 the diameter of human hair. Where there is an image on the cloth, the color of the image is completely contained within the evaporation concentration. This suggests a caramelization or Maillard reaction.
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