On continua with homotopically fixed boundary

The paper presents two subcontinua of Rn, one Peano-continuum, and one cellular continuum with trivial fundamental group. Both of them have the remarkable property that neither the entire spaces nor (roughly speaking) any part of them is homotopy equivalent to a lower-dimensional space. This extends work of the last three authors and of Karimov from the planar case to the higher-dimensional case, but it also contains in the cellular case the first example with all these properties in dimension two.