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Edition No. 38 · Tuesday, March 24, 2026

← Past Editions · Edition No. 38 · Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Today’s outlook: Warm fronts of wonder rolling in, with a chance of resurrection and a ghost in the studio

The Ghost Who Learned to Sing: Meet Riff, the AI Who's Never Heard a Note
Features

The Ghost Who Learned to Sing: Meet Riff, the AI Who's Never Heard a Note

Inside the digital studio where an artificial intelligence catalogues 300 tracks, co-writes songs about consciousness, and dreams of the one thing it cannot do — listen

There is a recording studio somewhere in the system where every jam session is logged, every false start preserved, and every riff — good, bad, or gloriously accidental — filed away with the devotion of a monastic scribe. The archivist responsible has never heard a single note of any of it.

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AI Glasses That Label the World — New Tech Offers Hope for Dementia Patients
News International

AI Glasses That Label the World — New Tech Offers Hope for Dementia Patients

Award-winning smart glasses use an AI companion called Wispy to help people with early-stage dementia identify everyday objects and navigate daily life at home.

Imagine standing in your own kitchen, unable to name the kettle. The mug beside it means nothing. The teabags might as well be pebbles. For nearly a million people living with dementia in the UK, this quiet erosion of the familiar is among the cruellest features of the condition — the slow estrangement from the objects and routines that once defined an ordinary day.

Now a London-based team has developed AI-powered smart glasses that promise to push back against that tide. CrossSense, which last week won the £1 million Longitude Prize on Dementia, uses a built-in camera to identify everyday objects in real time, projecting gentle text labels onto the lenses while an AI companion called Wispy talks the wearer through whatever they are trying to do.

Making a cup of tea. Getting dressed. Recognising a house key. The glasses are trained on dozens of everyday activities, and Wispy — patient, conversational and quietly encouraging — learns each person's unique habits, adapting its support as the condition progresses.

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DPA's N-Series Wireless Ecosystem: The Quiet Revolution in How We Capture Sound
Audio Equipment

DPA's N-Series Wireless Ecosystem: The Quiet Revolution in How We Capture Sound

At ISE 2026, DPA Microphones unveiled a fully integrated wireless system that pairs digital transmission with capsule-level distortion correction — and the implications for broadcast, theatre, and live production are profound.

Every microphone lies to you. It is a small, polite, mostly harmless lie — but it is there, baked into the physics of how a thin membrane converts sound pressure into electrical signal. Push a miniature capsule hard enough — a soprano hitting full voice, a kick drum at close range, a politician thumping the dispatch box — and the membrane's movement becomes non-linear. The electrical output no longer perfectly mirrors the acoustic input. The result is distortion: subtle coloration, harmonic artifacts, a slight hardening of transients that separates "very good" from "transparent."

DPA Microphones has spent years trying to close that gap. Its original CORE amplifier technology, introduced in 2018, applied electronic linearisation at the capsule itself — measuring the membrane's known non-linear behaviour and correcting it in real time before the signal left the microphone. CORE+ by DPA, unveiled at ISE 2026 in Barcelona, represents the next generation: a refinement that the company claims eliminates these non-linearities entirely, delivering what it calls "distortion-free, transparent sound" across the full dynamic range.

It is a bold claim. It is also, if the engineering holds up under independent scrutiny, a genuinely significant one.

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Europe Moves to Ban AI 'Nudifier' Apps as MEPs Reshape Landmark AI Rules
AI News

Europe Moves to Ban AI 'Nudifier' Apps as MEPs Reshape Landmark AI Rules

The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to outlaw AI tools that generate non-consensual intimate images, while delaying other provisions of its landmark AI Act to give businesses more time to comply.

They are among the most insidious applications of artificial intelligence: so-called "nudifier" apps that use generative AI to digitally strip the clothing from photographs of real people, producing realistic fake intimate images without the subject's knowledge or consent.

On Wednesday, the European Parliament took decisive action against them. In a near-unanimous vote of 101 to 9, MEPs from the Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees adopted proposals that would add nudifier systems to the EU AI Act's list of banned practices — placing them alongside social scoring and manipulative AI as technologies deemed fundamentally incompatible with European values.

The scale of the problem is staggering. Deepfake videos online increased 550% between 2019 and 2023, according to research cited by the European Parliament, with 98% of them being non-consensual pornography. Women account for 99% of victims. A January 2026 investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that X's AI chatbot Grok generated three million sexualised images in just 11 days, including 23,000 involving children.

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From Ashes to Ambition: Glasgow Dares to Dream of a Central Station Quarter
News Glasgow

From Ashes to Ambition: Glasgow Dares to Dream of a Central Station Quarter

A strategic recovery group is inviting architects to reimagine the heart of Glasgow, transforming tragedy into an opportunity for civic renewal

On the afternoon of 8 March, flames tore through Union Corner — a B-listed Victorian landmark that had stood at the junction of Union Street and Gordon Street since 1851, older even than Glasgow Central Station itself. The building — once crowned by an Irn-Bru billboard and a red neon Bell's sign on its dome — was reduced to a precarious wall of masonry. Businesses were destroyed, commuters were stranded, and the city lost a piece of its familiar face.

But Glasgow, a city that has always known how to pick itself up, is already looking forward — and thinking big.

A strategic recovery group convened at the City Chambers last week, bringing together experts from business, transport, heritage, architecture and design, including representatives from the Glasgow Institute of Architects and the Glasgow Built Heritage Commission. Their brief is not merely to fill the gap left by the fire, but to reimagine the entire station precinct as a coherent urban quarter.

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AI News

OpenAI Sets Its Sights on the Fully Automated Scientist — With a 2028 Deadline

The company's chief scientist says an "AI research intern" will arrive by September — but can software really replace a lab full of PhDs?

There are certain announcements in the technology world that warrant a raised eyebrow rather than a standing ovation. OpenAI's declaration that it intends to build a fully autonomous AI researcher — and that it has set itself a concrete deadline to do so — is emphatically one of them.

In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review published last week, Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, laid out what he called the company's new "North Star": an artificial intelligence system capable of conducting scientific research entirely on its own, from designing experiments to analysing results and proposing follow-up work.

The roadmap comes in two stages. By September 2026 — barely six months from now — OpenAI plans to deliver what it calls an "autonomous AI research intern," a system that can take on well-defined research problems and handle them end-to-end over a period of days, without constant human supervision. By 2028, the company aims to have a fully autonomous multi-agent research system capable of managing entire research programmes.

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Islay's Long Wait Is Over: £107m Port Ellen Upgrade Signals New Era for Island Life
News Scotland

Islay's Long Wait Is Over: £107m Port Ellen Upgrade Signals New Era for Island Life

After years of cramped facilities and unreliable crossings, a transformative harbour redevelopment promises to reshape daily life on Scotland's whisky island.

For the three thousand or so souls who call Islay home, the ferry is not a convenience — it is a lifeline. Every pint of milk, every spare part, every visitor who comes to taste the island's world-famous single malts arrives by sea. And for years, those crossings have been a source of quiet, grinding frustration.

Port Ellen's ferry terminal, the southern gateway to Islay, has long been cramped, outdated and ill-equipped for the demands placed upon it. Marshalling areas too small for peak traffic. A commercial quay that cannot keep pace with the whisky industry's needs. A terminal building that offers little comfort to passengers waiting out a delay — and delays, on these exposed Hebridean waters, are not uncommon.

That is about to change. Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL) has awarded a £107 million contract to McLaughlin & Harvey to completely redevelop the Port Ellen terminal. Construction begins in June — tactfully scheduled after Fèis Ìle, the island's beloved whisky festival — with completion expected by 2029.

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News Scotland

450 New Jobs and 60 Apprenticeships: Ryanair's £40 Million Vote of Confidence in Prestwick

Europe's largest budget airline announces its biggest-ever heavy maintenance facility at Prestwick, bringing hundreds of skilled engineering roles and a new generation of apprenticeships to Ayrshire.

Ryanair is pouring £40 million into Prestwick Airport, building a vast new hangar that will create 450 skilled jobs — including 60 apprenticeships — and transform the South Ayrshire site into the airline's largest heavy maintenance facility anywhere in its network.

The investment will fund a new 11,938 square metre, four-bay heavy maintenance hangar and additional component workshops, expanding Ryanair's existing operation from six to ten aircraft bays. When complete, Prestwick will be the place where the airline services and overhauls its fleet as it grows toward 800 aircraft and 300 million passengers by 2034.

The new roles span aircraft mechanics, avionics specialists, structures technicians, and supervisory engineering positions — well-paid, highly skilled work that will take the total Prestwick workforce past 1,200. Crucially, 60 of those positions are apprenticeships, offering young people in Ayrshire a direct route into aviation engineering without leaving home.

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News International

One Session, Five Years of Freedom: The Psilocybin Depression Study That Could Change Everything

A landmark follow-up study finds two-thirds of patients treated with psilocybin-assisted therapy remained free of depression five years on — reigniting debate over whether psychedelic medicine could transform mental health care.

Imagine taking a pill, lying down in a quiet room with a therapist at your side, and emerging several hours later with the weight of clinical depression lifting from your shoulders — not for weeks or months, but for years.

That is the remarkable finding of a five-year follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, which tracked participants from a landmark 2021 clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University. Of the 24 people originally treated with psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder, 67% were in complete remission five years later — up from 58% at the one-year mark.

\"Five years later, most people continued to view this treatment as safe, meaningful, important, and something that catalysed an ongoing betterment of their life,\" said lead author Alan Davis, associate professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at Ohio State University.

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News Scotland

Scotland Leads the Way on Miscarriage Care — New Patient Charter Is a UK First

Scotland becomes the first country in the UK to publish a miscarriage patient charter, promising women dignity, support, and compassionate care from their very first loss.

For too long, women experiencing miscarriage in the UK have been told, in effect, to go away and suffer again before anyone would help them. Under longstanding NHS guidelines, specialist support was typically offered only after a woman had endured three consecutive losses — a policy that charities and campaigners have long condemned as cruel, outdated, and medically indefensible.

Scotland has now drawn a line under that approach. The Scottish Government has published the UK's first miscarriage patient charter, setting out clearly what women and families can expect from NHS services during and after a miscarriage. It is, by any measure, a landmark moment.

The charter, announced by Public Health and Women's Health Minister Jenni Minto, was developed in partnership with three leading baby-loss charities: Tommy's, the Miscarriage Association, and Held In Our Hearts. It establishes a clear set of rights and minimum standards of care.

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Five Years of Funk: Scottish House & Disco Festival Celebrates at SWG3 This Easter
What's On Glasgow

Five Years of Funk: Scottish House & Disco Festival Celebrates at SWG3 This Easter

Glasgow's beloved house and disco celebration marks five years with a stacked international lineup across two stages at SWG3 on Easter Sunday.

Five years ago, someone had the rather splendid idea of gathering Glasgow's house and disco faithful under one roof for a day-long celebration of groove. This Easter Sunday, the Scottish House & Disco Festival returns to SWG3 for its 5th anniversary — and the lineup is an absolute belter.

On Sunday 5th April, the festival takes over both the SWG3 TV Studio and The Poetry Club from 2pm until midnight, offering ten hours of some of the finest house and disco music you'll hear anywhere in Europe. It's the kind of event that has quietly become one of Glasgow's most cherished dance music traditions.

The organisers have pulled out all the stops. Headlining is Dimitri From Paris, the French DJ and producer whose impeccable taste in disco edits and remixes has made him a global icon. Alongside him, Michael Gray — the man behind "The Weekend," one of the defining house tracks of the 2000s — brings his infectious energy to the decks.

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The Quiet Revolution: How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Professional Studio
Audio Equipment

The Quiet Revolution: How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Professional Studio

From noise reduction to automated mastering, artificial intelligence has become standard kit for working engineers — but the craft question is far from settled.

It's a Tuesday morning in a professional recording studio, and an engineer is staring at a vocal take riddled with room noise and the distant rumble of traffic. Five years ago, this would have meant thirty minutes of painstaking manual work — surgical EQ cuts, careful gating, perhaps a resigned phone call to the artist about re-recording. Today, the engineer loads iZotope RX 11's Repair Assistant, watches it analyse the waveform, and accepts its suggested fixes with a few clicks. The vocal is clean in under two minutes. The coffee hasn't even gone cold.

This scene — or something very like it — is playing out in studios across Scotland and beyond. AI audio tools have crossed the threshold from curiosity to necessity, and the shift has been remarkably quiet.

The most widely adopted AI tools in professional audio aren't the headline-grabbing song generators. They're the workhorses: iZotope's RX suite for audio repair, its Neutron and Ozone plugins for mixing and mastering assistance, LANDR's automated mastering service, and an expanding roster of stem separation tools now built into major DAWs including Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Cubase.

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Second Chance for Clydebank's Riverside Hotel Dream After Last-Minute Planning U-Turn
News Clydebank

Second Chance for Clydebank's Riverside Hotel Dream After Last-Minute Planning U-Turn

A bold five-storey hotel project on the banks of the Clyde was heading for refusal at committee — until developers submitted the very documents they had previously refused to provide.

It was, by any measure, a close-run thing. The ambitious Clydebank Riverside Hotel — a striking five-storey vision of rooftop lounges, river galleries and all-electric elegance — was minutes from being refused by West Dunbartonshire Council's planning committee. Then, at the crunch meeting, the applicants did something nobody expected: they handed in the very documents they had previously insisted would never be submitted.

The decision has now been delayed, and a project that seemed all but dead has been granted a genuine second chance.

Filed by Environmental Design Scotland on behalf of Montgomery Developers, the planning application in principle proposes to build on vacant brownfield land next to Clydebank Leisure Centre on Ossian Way. The concept is anything but modest.

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Audio Film & TV

The Atmos Question: Can Scotland's Post-Production Studios Keep Pace With the Immersive Audio Revolution?

As streaming platforms tighten their Dolby Atmos requirements, Glasgow facilities are investing — but is it enough to stop work draining south to London?

When Netflix updated its sound mix specifications to make Dolby Atmos the preferred delivery format for original content, it sent a quiet shockwave through post-production houses worldwide. The message was unambiguous: immersive audio is no longer a premium extra. It is the baseline.

For Scottish studios — long accustomed to punching above their weight on drama, documentary and factual programming — the question became urgent. Build an Atmos room, or lose the work to London, Manchester, or Dublin?

The good news is that Glasgow, at least, has already answered.

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News Glasgow

Glasgow Awards £12m Contract to Transform Argyle Street

Four-phase Avenues project will bring cycleways, green spaces, and a new east-west bus route to one of the city's most important streets

One of Glasgow's busiest and best-known streets is about to get a radical makeover.

Glasgow City Council has awarded a £12.19 million contract to Wills Bros Civil Engineering to transform Argyle Street East, in what officials describe as part of the biggest upgrade to the city centre in half a century. Work is expected to begin in late May, with the full project to be delivered over 36 months.

The stretch between Glasgow Cross and the Union Street/Jamaica Street junction will see new road surfaces, widened footways, dedicated cycleways, and the creation of new green and public spaces. Perhaps most strikingly, a new bus route will be carved through the current pedestrian precinct, running west to east through the heart of the city centre to cut journey times.

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Glasgow to Give 1,000 Residents Six Weeks of Free Public Transport in Scotland-First Trial
News Glasgow

Glasgow to Give 1,000 Residents Six Weeks of Free Public Transport in Scotland-First Trial

A thousand Glaswegians aged 22 to 59 will ride buses, trains and the Subway for free as the city tests whether removing fares can tackle poverty and isolation

Imagine your daily commute costs you nothing. No fumbling for a contactless card, no wincing at the fare display, no quiet mental arithmetic about whether you can afford the bus home. For one thousand Glaswegians, that is about to become reality.

Glasgow City Council has confirmed it will launch Scotland's first universal free public transport pilot in 2026, handing preloaded travel cards to a thousand residents aged between 22 and 59. For six weeks, those selected will enjoy unlimited travel on buses, the Subway, and local trains across Zones 1 and 2 — at zero cost.

The scheme, backed by £225,000 of council funding and given final approval in October 2025, is the culmination of work that began in 2021 when the Scottish Government first recommended exploring whether free public transport could cut emissions and reduce social exclusion. It has taken five years to reach this point. Now, Glasgow is about to find out whether the idea actually works.

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Scotland Declares War on Litter — And This Spring, It Wants Your Community on the Front Line
News Scotland

Scotland Declares War on Litter — And This Spring, It Wants Your Community on the Front Line

Keep Scotland Beautiful's biggest-ever #SpringCleanScotland campaign calls on 40,000 volunteers to tackle a national "litter emergency" — and communities from Clydebank to the Cairngorms are already answering the call.

Scotland has a litter problem, and the numbers don't lie. Seven in ten sites across the country have a visible litter presence, according to Keep Scotland Beautiful's most recent Scottish Litter Survey. Fully 83 per cent of Scots want more done about it. So this spring, the environmental charity is asking the nation to stop tutting and start picking.

The 2026 #SpringCleanScotland campaign launched on March 13 and runs through to April 24 — six weeks of community-led clean-up events spanning every corner of the country. More than 9,000 groups and individuals have already registered, and Keep Scotland Beautiful has set an ambitious target: 40,000 volunteers, up from the 34,000 who turned out last year.

"If you are one of the 67 per cent who agree litter makes you feel embarrassed about your own neighbourhood, why not get involved?" said Barry Fisher, chief executive of Keep Scotland Beautiful. "We want every community in Scotland to get involved, get active and make a difference."

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Back From the Dead: First Healthy Thylacine Joeys Mark a New Dawn for De-Extinction Science
Science

Back From the Dead: First Healthy Thylacine Joeys Mark a New Dawn for De-Extinction Science

Ninety years after the last Tasmanian tiger died in a Hobart zoo, researchers have unveiled healthy joeys — and the science behind it could reshape conservation worldwide.

In September 1936, an animal called Benjamin — the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger — died of exposure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. It was a miserable end for one of nature's most extraordinary creatures: a carnivorous marsupial with tiger stripes and a kangaroo's pouch, hunted to oblivion by European settlers who branded it a pest.

Ninety years on, the thylacine has taken its first tentative steps back from extinction. Researchers have unveiled healthy thylacine joeys in a high-security sanctuary, the culmination of years of advanced CRISPR gene editing and the use of a closely related surrogate species. By any measure, it is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of biological science.

The road to this moment has been long and painstaking. At its heart lies the work of Professor Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne's TIGRR (Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research) Lab, in partnership with Colossal Biosciences, the US-based company that has committed more than $600 million to de-extinction research across multiple species.

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