VATICAN CITY - Using high-tech lasers shooting pulses of ultraviolet light, Italy's national research agency succeeded in reproducing on linen cloth colorations similar to those seen on the Shroud of Turin.

The enormous technical difficulty in achieving the positive results also makes it highly unlikely that the shroud is a fake from medieval times, the agency said.

The Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, or ENEA, spent five years looking for ways to recreate the micro-thin, yellow-sepia toned colorations that form the image of a man on the Turin shroud, said the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, Dec. 29.