FEAST OR FAMINE

The Xactilias Project (2017) is set in southeast Asia in contemporary times. American Claire Foley is detained. ‘Men of power know this one true fact … fear is the one true controller.’ She is advised that ‘Sometimes, you cannot win … But you can still decide how you will lose.’ She is detained because she is a genius, with a photographic memory, and the people detaining her want her intellectual gifts to do something ‘unimaginable.’ She is a genetics researcher – on human aging, but the mysterious company wants her to work for them on the Xactilias Project, for one year, but they keep the details vague. When Claire agrees, she must keep the recruitment details a secret. She is taken to the residential laboratory in a secret location in southeast Asia. There are dark secrets in the laboratory and Claire inevitably takes control of her own liberation. But its not that easy. As her 72-year-old friend Alfred says: ‘You have a brilliant mind, but even you can’t se...

There were only three Northern White Rhino’s on the planet last year, when I visited Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy in August 2017: one male and two females. Now there are only two females left. Sudan, the male died on Monday 19 March 2018 at the age of 45. The two females remaining are Sudan’s daughter Najin, and his granddaughter Fatu. Both females are in-bred and are not capable of reproducing naturally. So, in April 2017 he sought love on Tinder, the dating network. Respondents who were interested in him were asked to donate to artificial breeding research in order to save the species. The only way to save the Northern White Rhino was through articifial insemination of the eggs of the females with stored sperm from Sudan and other males. The fertilized eggs would then be implanted into females of the Southern White Rhino, which is a close relative. There are two subspecies of the White Rhinoceros: the Northern White Rhino (on the verge of extinction) and the Sout...

In the United Kingdom there is currently only one family to have six generations alive at the same time – and they are all female. The British family is believed to be only the second family in the UK to have six generations alive at the same time. The world-record for the highest number of living generations in the same family is seven, which was achieved in 1989 by a family in America. Ruby Snowling is 100 years old. Ruby had eight children with her husband Russell before he died in 1979, aged 72. Ruby now lives with her 81-year-old son Albert in Norfolk. In the photograph, Ruby is in the middle, holding Meiche. Ruby’s daughter is 79-year-old Dorothy Matthews, in the dark trousers sitting next to Ruby. Dorothy and her husband Donald have two children, and they live nearby. Dorothy’s daughter is 60-year-old Sandra Smith, who is sitting on the opposite side of Ruby. Sandra and her husband Derek, from Suffolk, have two children. Sandra’s daughter is 40-year-old Sa...