Friday, April 3, 2026 — Edition No. 48 — The Cornmill Intelligencer

← Past Editions · Edition No. 48 · Friday, April 3, 2026

Today’s outlook: Spring evenings alive with the churr of good news

Dogs & Animals Wildlife

Britain's Most Mysterious Night Bird Doubles Its Population in Remarkable Comeback

Targeted heathland restoration is bringing the elusive, bark-camouflaged nightjar back from the brink — and Scotland is joining the celebration

You will almost certainly never see one. That is rather the point.

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What's On Glasgow

Big Feed's Easter Weekend at Govan Graving Docks Called Off — But There's Another Way to Get Your Street Food Fix

Met Office wind warning forces cancellation of near sold-out street food celebration, but Big Feed's Golf It collaboration at Hogganfield Loch rolls on

Glasgow's much-anticipated Big Feed Easter Weekend at Govan Graving Docks has been cancelled after the Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for wind across most of Scotland.

Gusts of 50 to 60mph are forecast from 4pm on Saturday through to midday on Easter Sunday, and organisers of the near sold-out street food event took the difficult decision to call it off.

"It's with a heavy heart we unfortunately have to cancel," Big Feed said. "We are absolutely gutted but as always the safety of you guys and our traders is the priority."

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What's On Glasgow

Three Nights, Two Venues, One Rising Star: Brooke Combe Is Having a Glasgow Moment This April

The Midlothian soul singer plays King Tut's this Monday before stepping up to two nights at Saint Luke's — with Donegal blues prodigy Muireann Bradley opening all three shows

Three nights in Glasgow in a single month. For a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Dalkeith, that's not just a tour schedule — it's a statement of intent.

Brooke Combe plays King Tut's Wah Wah Hut this Monday (April 6), then returns later in the month for two consecutive nights at Saint Luke's on April 23 and 24. If you haven't caught her live yet, this is your month.

Raised on her grandparents' Motown records and her parents' 90s neo-soul collection, Combe first turned heads with her 2021 debut single "Are You With Me?" — a glossy, hand-clapping anthem that won her the Scottish Music Awards' Best Female Breakthrough that same year. A Glastonbury appearance followed in 2022, along with a deal with Island Records.

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AI News

OpenAI Closes Record $122 Billion Funding Round as IPO Race Heats Up

The maker of ChatGPT has raised more money than most countries spend in a year — and ordinary investors are getting a piece of the action

The company behind ChatGPT has just raised $122 billion in a single funding round — the largest in the history of artificial intelligence, and one of the biggest in the history of technology full stop.

OpenAI announced on Monday that it closed the mammoth round at a valuation of $852 billion, backed by a who's who of the technology and finance worlds: SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft, alongside venture capital giants Andreessen Horowitz and D.E. Shaw Ventures.

To put the figures in perspective: $852 billion is roughly the entire GDP of Switzerland. OpenAI is now valued more highly than all but a handful of publicly traded companies on Earth — and it hasn't even gone public yet.

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News Scotland

Heat in the Home: Scotland's £10 Million Emergency Scheme Brings Relief to Rural Households

New fund offers up to £300 for families dependent on heating oil and LPG as global energy prices bite

For tens of thousands of families across rural Scotland, the question of how to heat the home has become painfully urgent. Now, help is at hand.

The Scottish Government's Emergency Heating Oil Scheme opened for applications on 1 April 2026, offering up to £300 per household to those struggling with the rising cost of heating oil and liquid petroleum gas (LPG). Backed by a £10 million fund, it targets the communities that standard energy support has long overlooked — the crofts and cottages of the Highlands, Argyll, and the islands, where mains gas has never reached.

"The sudden rise in heating oil and LPG prices due to global events has come as a shock to many people, particularly in rural and island areas," said Housing Secretary Màiri McAllan.

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Audio Equipment

Studio Tools Storm the Stage: SSL Live V6.2 Brings Onboard Vocal Tuning and Immersive IEM Mixing to Every Console in the Field

SolidPitch, KLANG integration, and Automation Preview headline a free firmware update previewing at NAB 2026 — and every existing SSL Live console gets it.

There was a time — not so very long ago — when a touring sound engineer who wanted pitch correction on a vocalist needed a dedicated rack unit or a laptop running third-party software, perched precariously on the production desk like an uninvited guest at dinner. Those days, it appears, are numbered.

Solid State Logic will preview SSL Live V6.2 at the NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 18–22), and the headline feature is SolidPitch — a native, onboard vocal tuning and processing engine built directly into the console's DSP. No outboard. No laptop. No additional licence fees. It runs inside the desk.

SolidPitch is not merely a pitch corrector bolted onto a live platform. It is a three-part vocal processing engine offering tuning, doubling, and diatonic harmonisation — the sort of toolkit that, until now, lived exclusively in the studio or required a separate software chain running alongside the console.

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Science

A 3.2-Gigapixel Camera Is Filming the Whole Sky Every Three Nights — and Already Changing What We Know About the Universe

From a Chilean mountaintop, the Vera Rubin Observatory is scanning the cosmos for anything that moves, explodes or flickers — and Edinburgh scientists are helping to make sense of the deluge

Somewhere on a mountaintop in northern Chile, the largest digital camera ever built is quietly photographing the universe — all of it — and it barely pauses for breath.

The LSST Camera at the heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory packs 3.2 gigapixels across a focal plane the size of a small car bonnet. It captures a fresh patch of sky every 40 seconds, and over three nights it maps the entire visible southern hemisphere. Then it does it again. And again. And it will keep doing so for the next decade.

On the night of 24 February, the system issued its first scientific alerts — 800,000 in a single session. Each one flagged something that had changed since the camera last looked: a new supernova igniting in a distant galaxy, an asteroid shifting position against the stars, a black hole flaring as it consumed nearby matter. The observatory is expected to eventually produce up to seven million alerts every night.

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