Friday, May 8, 2026 — Edition No. 84 — The Cornmill Intelligencer

← Past Editions · Edition No. 84 · Friday, May 8, 2026

Today’s outlook: No limits, no ceilings — just horizons

Science

From a Tanzanian classroom to NASA's Artemis II: the engineer telling Glasgow's girls there are no limits

Dr Alinda Mashiku grew up dreaming of space when it felt impossibly far away. Now she keeps NASA's satellites from crashing — and she has a message for every Scottish schoolgirl wondering if STEM is for her.

By Helen Cooper

When Alinda Mashiku was a little girl in Tanzania, she would look up at the night sky and dream of becoming an astronaut. The stars, she has said, felt almost impossibly far away.

This year, she helped keep NASA's Artemis II mission safely on its record-breaking journey around the Moon.

Dr Mashiku is the Program Manager of NASA's Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) programme — the team that stops the agency's satellites colliding with anything in orbit. In an interview broadcast by UN News, she has a message for girls in Glasgow, Clydebank and across Scotland who are wondering whether science is really for them.

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Science

Tuvalu's Quiet Revolution: A Pacific Nation Builds New Land to Outpace the Sea

With dredgers, determination and a deep love of home, Tuvaluans are crafting ground designed to sit above the waves long after 2100.

By Henry Davenport

On a slender ribbon of coral in the west-central Pacific, a small nation is doing something rather extraordinary. Tuvalu is, quite literally, making more of itself.

While much of the world frets about rising seas in the abstract, the 6,000 or so Tuvaluans on the frontline have set about a remarkable feat of engineering: they are dredging sand from the lagoon floor and building entirely new land — ground designed to stay above the waves well beyond the year 2100.

The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, run by the country's government with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Green Climate Fund, has so far created more than seven hectares of new land, UN News reports. A second phase, begun in 2024, will add another eight hectares along the southern shore of the capital, Funafuti, where six in ten Tuvaluans live.

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Community

Skip to it: Channel Islanders invited to bounce, scoot and stride their way to work

Better Journeys Week returns to Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man from 18 May, with organisers urging commuters to ditch the car and find their inner six-year-old

What's On Glasgow

Comfort, creativity and a Glasgow garden: Gartnavel exhibition pairs artists with hospital patients

A year-long show at Gartnavel Royal pairs Project Ability artists with hospital inpatients, all inspired by the wildlife on their doorstep

By Helen Cooper

Tucked into the leafy grounds of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, a quiet, generous exhibition is inviting Glasgow to slow down and look at nature through someone else's eyes.

The Gartnavel Royal Summer House Residency brings together artists from Project Ability and inpatients at the hospital, all responding to the same prompt: comfort and disturbance in the natural world. The result is a warm, eclectic show of paintings, drawings and prints inspired by the wildlife, flowers and gardens that surround the West End site.

It is on now at the Art in the Gart Gallery, on the ground floor of The Hub at Gartnavel Royal, and runs daily from 10am to 5pm until 1 October 2026. Admission is free.

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Community Glasgow

Glasgow's First Martyrs Find Their Voice: A New Song for the Calton Weavers

The Tenementals premiere 'The Broken Stones of the Calton Weavers' — an anthem for the six men shot dead in a 1787 strike, and for the city that almost forgot them.

By Henry Davenport

In a quiet corner of the East End, three weavers lie in ground most Glaswegians have never visited. They were shot dead in 1787 by troops sent to break a strike over wages and working conditions. They were Scotland's first working-class martyrs. And until very recently, the city they helped to shape had all but forgotten them.

That neglect is what a new song, freshly premiered in Glasgow, hopes to put right.

The Broken Stones of the Calton Weavers, by the academic-musical collective The Tenementals, has just been given its first public airing at The Great May Day Cabaret on 4 May, where the band headlined International Workers' Day celebrations in the city. An earlier outing came on 21 April at the Scottish Trades Union Congress President's Dinner — a fitting first audience, given that the Weavers' story is, in essence, the story of how working people first learned to organise.

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Health Glasgow

Glasgow midwives: 'You don't have to go through this alone'

NHSGGC's perinatal mental health team has helped more than 250 women through wellbeing workshops — and they want every expectant mum to know support is one phone call away

By Helen Cooper

Around one in five women will experience a mental health problem during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. In Glasgow, the midwives who work with them every day have a simple message this week: you are not alone, and help is closer than you think.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Midwives are using Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week, which runs from 4 to 10 May, to remind expectant and new mums of the support quietly building up across the region — including a free wellbeing workshop that has already helped more than 250 local women.

The NHSGGC Maternity Wellbeing Workshop is a 90-minute session for pregnant women, delivered both in person and online. It covers emotional wellbeing, managing stress and anxiety, relaxation and grounding techniques, hypnobirthing, and advice on bonding and self-care after birth.

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