Saturday, March 28, 2026 — Edition No. 42 — The Cornmill Intelligencer

← Past Editions · Edition No. 42 · Saturday, March 28, 2026

Today’s outlook: Sunny with a 100% chance of old dogs learning new tricks

Dogs & Animals

Meet Colin: The 16-Year-Old Terrier Who Found a Forever Home in Just 26 Days

Dogs Trust Glasgow's first adoption of 2026 is a senior terrier crossbreed rescued from Northern Ireland — proof that older dogs still have plenty of love to give

When Gillian Andrade spotted Colin on the Dogs Trust website, she didn't see a 16-year-old dog nearing the end of his road. She saw a pair of soft brown eyes and a face that needed a home.

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AI News

Arm Builds Its First Physical Chip in 35 Years — and Meta Is First in Line

The British chip giant has only ever licensed designs. Now it's making silicon of its own — and it could reshape the AI data centre race.

For more than 35 years, Arm Holdings has been the invisible architecture beneath almost every smartphone on the planet. Its chip designs power iPhones, Android devices, and an expanding share of cloud computing — but Arm itself never made a physical processor. It licensed its blueprints, collected royalties, and let others do the manufacturing.

That era is over.

On Tuesday, Arm unveiled the AGI CPU — its first in-house chip, a 136-core data centre processor built on TSMC's cutting-edge 3-nanometre process. It is designed from the ground up for AI inference: the task of running trained models at speed, rather than training them from scratch.

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Community

Last Chance to Nominate Your Unsung Hero for the BBC Make a Difference Awards

BBC Radio Scotland is calling for nominations — but you've only got until 5pm on Monday to put someone's name forward.

You know the person. They're in every community — the neighbour who checks in on the elderly couple down the road, the teenager who organises litter picks after school, the volunteer who gives up every Saturday to run the local food bank. They never ask for thanks. They probably wouldn't know what to do with it if they got it.

The BBC Make a Difference Awards exist to find exactly these people — and this year, nominations close at 5pm on Monday 31 March. That gives you the weekend to think about who deserves a moment in the spotlight.

BBC Radio Scotland is one of the key partners behind the awards, which are now in their fourth year. Last year, more than 12,500 people across the UK were nominated by friends, family and neighbours who wanted the world to know about someone special. This year, the BBC is hoping for even more.

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News Glasgow

Glasgow Central Is Back: Full Timetable Restored After Union Street Fire Disruption

All 15 high-level platforms reopened as Scotland's busiest station returns to normal service after more than two weeks of disruption

Glasgow Central station has thrown open all 15 of its high-level platforms and restored a full timetable, bringing enormous relief to tens of thousands of commuters after more than two weeks of disruption caused by a devastating fire on neighbouring Union Street.

From Wednesday 25 March, ScotRail, Avanti West Coast, TransPennine Express, CrossCountry and Caledonian Sleeper services are all running normally once again from Scotland's busiest railway station — a moment many Glasgow travellers had been awaiting with growing impatience.

The trouble began on Sunday 8 March, when a fire broke out in a vape shop on Union Street and rapidly engulfed Union Corner, a Victorian building dating back to 1851 at the junction with Gordon Street. The blaze destroyed the structure, leaving only its façade standing, and forced the complete closure of Glasgow Central's high-level platforms for a full ten days.

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News Glasgow

'Govan Finally Gets Its Riverfront Back': A 40-Year Fight Ends With Glasgow's Newest Riverside Park

After four decades behind industrial fencing, the Clyde waterfront at Govan Graving Docks is open to the people who never stopped fighting for it

There is a particular kind of stubbornness found in Govan — the kind that does not march or shout, but simply refuses to give up. On Friday, that stubbornness was rewarded.

The Riverside Park at the historic Govan Graving Docks opened its gates to the public for the first time in nearly four decades, transforming a stretch of derelict Clyde waterfront into greenspace, public art, seating, and a gathering place for a community that has waited a very long time.

"For decades, we've looked at this site through a fence, but today Govan finally gets its riverfront back," said Deirdre Gaughan, Chair of the Govan Graving Docks Trust.

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Dogs & Animals Wildlife

Scotland's £65 Million Nature Mission Is Working — And the Newts, Whales, and Woodlands Are the Proof

From a Highland newt's miraculous comeback to whale-saving innovations off the Scottish coast, the Nature Restoration Fund is delivering real results — and now the law is catching up

Somewhere in the Highlands, a Great Crested Newt is alive today that, by any reasonable reckoning, should not be. A few years ago, its chances of surviving to adulthood stood at a dismal two per cent — odds that would make a bookmaker wince. Today, thanks to the Highland Amphibians Reptile Project, that figure has risen to thirteen per cent. It may not sound like a revolution, but in conservation terms it is precisely that: a sixfold improvement that has enabled what is believed to be the first translocation of Great Crested Newts anywhere in Europe.

That small, warty amphibian — Britain's rarest newt — is perhaps the most charming emblem of Scotland's Nature Restoration Fund, which has now passed the £65 million milestone since its launch in 2021. More than 250 projects have been funded across the country, from river valleys to remote coastlines, and the results are becoming impossible to ignore.

"The Nature Restoration Fund has come at a critical time and made a real difference," said Professor Colin Galbraith, chair of NatureScot. "People have been restoring saltmarshes and wetlands, enhancing rivers, creating woodlands and removing invasive species to help our plants and wildlife flourish."

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Dogs & Animals

Back From the Brink: Scotland's Wildcats Are Roaming the Cairngorms — And Scientists Are Daring to Hope

Three years after the first captive-bred wildcats were released into the Scottish Highlands, GPS tracking and camera traps reveal a population that is not just surviving — but breeding

For three centuries, the Scottish wildcat held on. Through deforestation, persecution, and the slow encroachment of civilisation into its Highland territory, Britain's last surviving wild cat clung to existence — until, in 2019, scientists delivered a devastating verdict: the species was functionally extinct in the wild.

Now, three years after the first captive-bred wildcats were released into the Cairngorms National Park, there are signs that the Highland Tiger may yet have a future. And for the first time, the scientists leading the effort are allowing themselves a cautious, data-backed measure of hope.

In the summer of 2023, the Saving Wildcats project — led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) — released 19 captive-bred wildcats into the Cairngorms Connect landscape. It was the first conservation translocation of wildcats ever attempted in the United Kingdom, and nobody could be certain it would work.

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Audio Equipment

SSL's Oracle Promises the End of the Recall Sheet: Full Analogue Sound, Full Instant Recall

The new flagship console uses ActiveAnalogue technology to deliver what engineers have chased for four decades — instant total recall without touching the analogue signal path

If you have ever worked on an analogue mixing console — or merely stood behind someone who has — you will know the ritual. The session ends. The engineer reaches for a camera, or a printed sheet covered in tiny circles, and begins the painstaking business of documenting every knob, fader, and routing switch on the desk. Polaroids of the patch bay. Handwritten notes on EQ curves. A small prayer that nothing gets bumped before the client returns for revisions.

For more than four decades, this has been the price of admission for analogue sound. The warmth, the depth, the harmonic character that no plug-in has quite replicated — all of it came tethered to a workflow that belonged to the age of the fountain pen.

Solid State Logic believes it has finally cut that tether.

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Science

AI Trawls Through Hubble's Archives and Finds 1,300 Cosmic Secrets We Never Knew Were There

A neural network called AnomalyMatch scanned 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days — uncovering merging galaxies, gravitational lenses, and objects that defy classification entirely

There are moments in the history of science when we are reminded, with humbling clarity, that what we thought we knew barely scratches the surface. This is one of them.

An artificial intelligence tool has combed through 35 years of archived images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and found more than 1,300 previously overlooked cosmic anomalies — including merging galaxies, gravitational lenses, and objects so strange they defy classification altogether. More than 800 of these had never been documented in scientific literature.

The sheer scale is staggering. Nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each just a few dozen pixels across, were analysed in two and a half days. A task that would have taken human astronomers years — perhaps decades — was accomplished before the weekend was out.

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News International

The Last Three Women of an Amazon Tribe Just Had a Baby — and the World Is Holding Its Breath

After decades of genocide, isolation and grief, the birth of a boy named Akyp has given the Akuntsu people — and the rainforest they protect — a reason to hope again.

In the dense, diminishing forests of Rondônia state in western Brazil, a baby's cry has broken a silence that lasted thirty years.

On 8 December 2025, Babawru — the youngest of the three surviving women of the Akuntsu people — gave birth to a boy. His name is Akyp, and his arrival has turned what many assumed would be a story of extinction into something altogether more extraordinary: a story of defiance, resilience, and the stubborn persistence of life against impossible odds.

The Akuntsu were once a community of perhaps 30 souls living deep in the Amazon rainforest. Then, in the 1980s, cattle ranchers backed by Brazil's military-era development push came for their land. Gunmen attacked the village. A bulldozer was driven over the remains to hide the evidence.

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Health

First Gene Therapy Offers Real Hope to Huntington's Families After Decades of Nothing

A UCL-led trial has shown a single brain surgery can slow the devastating disease by 75% — and Scotland, with some of the highest rates in the world, stands to benefit most

For families living with Huntington's disease, hope has always been the cruellest word. The condition — caused by a single inherited gene — strikes in middle age, stealing movement, memory, and personality in a relentless decline that can last two decades. Every child of an affected parent faces a coin-toss: a 50% chance of inheriting the same fate.

Until now, there has been nothing to slow it down. No drug, no therapy, no treatment of any kind that could alter the course of the disease. Only management of symptoms, and the long, grinding wait.

That wait may finally be over.

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Audio Equipment

From the Film Suite to the Home Studio: VoiceAssist Brings Post-Production AI Vocal Tech to Music

NoiseWorks' new plugin puts six AI-powered vocal processing tools — previously the preserve of film dialogue editors — into the hands of music producers. Early professional verdicts are remarkably enthusiastic.

There was a time when rescuing a badly recorded vocal meant one of two things: book another session, or make peace with mediocrity. That era may have just ended.

NoiseWorks, the German audio software company behind the popular DynAssist plugin, has released VoiceAssist — a tool that bundles six AI-powered vocal processing modules into a single plugin. What makes it remarkable isn't just what it does, but where the technology comes from: the world of film and television post-production, where dialogue editors have long used sophisticated AI to salvage audio recorded in noisy locations, echoey rooms, and unpredictable environments.

Now that same technology is available to anyone with a DAW and $299.

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News Clydebank

Community Groups Have Extra Time to Apply for West Dunbartonshire's £600,000 Regeneration Fund

Deadline for Pride in Place Impact Fund community grants extended to 12 April — here's how your group can bid for up to £100,000

If you run a community group in West Dunbartonshire and have ever looked at a tired building, a neglected park, or a run-down community hall and thought "we could do something with that" — there is £600,000 on the table, and the deadline to apply has just been extended.

West Dunbartonshire Council has pushed back the closing date for its Pride in Place Impact Fund community grants from 23 March to Sunday 12 April at midnight, giving local organisations more time to put together their bids.

The fund offers grants of between £10,000 and £100,000 for capital projects — the kind of work that physically transforms a space. Think refurbishing an underused building, upgrading community facilities, or improving a public area that's seen better days.

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Dogs & Animals

The Rottweiler Who Thinks She's a Duck Mum, and Other Cross-Species Bonds Melting Hearts Worldwide

From a rescue dog who quacks at her adopted ducklings to a cheetah cub raised by a Labrador, these unlikely animal friendships are backed by real science — and they're exactly what the world needs right now

She quacks back at them. That's the detail that gets you. Ziva, a rescue Rottweiler with a troubled past, has appointed herself mother to a clutch of ducklings — and she takes the job extremely seriously. She herds them across the yard. She brooded over their eggs until hatch day. And when they chatter at her, she quacks right back, apparently fluent in duckling.

The images have been lighting up social media feeds worldwide, flipping every assumption about what a Rottweiler is supposed to be. But animal behaviourists aren't remotely surprised. Psychologists point to surges of oxytocin — the same "bonding hormone" that floods a human mother's brain — kicking in across species lines. Ziva's rescue background may even be part of the explanation: research suggests that animals who have recovered from trauma often redirect their healing energy outward, becoming fiercely nurturing caregivers.

She is far from alone.

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News Clydebank

£600,000 Up for Grabs: West Dunbartonshire Extends Deadline for Community Regeneration Grants

Community groups have until midnight on 12 April to apply for Pride in Place Impact Fund grants of up to £100,000

If you're part of a community group or voluntary organisation in West Dunbartonshire with a big idea for your local area, here's news worth acting on: the council has extended the deadline for its £600,000 Pride in Place Impact Fund, giving groups until midnight on Sunday 12 April to submit applications.

The fund offers grants of between £10,000 and £100,000 for capital projects that aim to transform underused buildings, improve public spaces, or enhance local facilities across the region. The original deadline of 23 March has been pushed back by nearly three weeks — a second chance for groups who may have missed the first window or need more time to pull their applications together.

Any group that is constituted, has its own bank account, operates on a not-for-profit basis, and works to benefit the residents of West Dunbartonshire is eligible. That includes community councils, sports clubs, heritage groups, youth organisations, and neighbourhood associations — essentially any properly constituted voluntary body with a project that could make a tangible difference locally.

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