Friday, May 15, 2026 — Edition No. 86 — The Cornmill Intelligencer

← Past Editions · Edition No. 86 · Friday, May 15, 2026

Today’s outlook: Glasgow shoots lasers, lemurs share screens, and Westminster comes to call

Science

Beam Me Up, Clydeside: Glasgow Laser Shoots Data Across the Clyde in World-First Demo

Vector Photonics and Fraunhofer UK fire an invisible PCSEL beam from the Science Centre to the Clydeside Distillery — and the future of secure comms just got a Glaswegian accent

By Damien Day

An invisible thread of light stitched the two banks of the River Clyde together on a damp March evening — and with it, Glasgow quietly stepped into the next chapter of global communications.

From the silver dome of the Glasgow Science Centre, a pencil-thin laser beam was fired across the dark water to the Clydeside Distillery on the opposite bank. Riding that beam: a torrent of data, travelling at the speed of light, without a single cable or radio wave in sight.

The demonstration, carried out on 31 March and announced last month by the University of Glasgow, is being hailed as a world first for a technology that until now has only ever worked under the controlled conditions of a laboratory.

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Health Research

Patients lead £3m push to ease the pain of inflammatory arthritis

Glasgow joins a UK-wide consortium putting the voices of people living with the condition at the heart of a five-year, Arthritis UK-funded study

By Helen Cooper

For Tom Esterine, "remission" has never quite meant what doctors say it should.

The 64-year-old from Brixton has lived with rheumatoid arthritis for 14 years. Even when tests suggest his inflammation has settled, the pain finds a way to stay. "Remission shouldn't still hurt," he says — and a new £3m research programme is taking him at his word.

Tom is a patient partner on TOPPIA — Targeting of Peripheral Pain in Inflammatory Arthritis — a UK-wide consortium funded by Arthritis UK that begins in autumn 2026. The five-year study, announced by the University of Glasgow, puts the lived experience of arthritis sufferers at the heart of the research agenda. Patients are not just being asked how the condition feels; they are helping to shape what scientists look for and how the results are judged.

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Science

Lemurs say yes to screen time — but only if they can share it

A Glasgow-led study at Blair Drummond Safari Park finds red-ruffed lemurs prefer collaborating with human visitors over going solo, hinting at a new tool for conservation

Science

Glasgow researchers teach driverless cars to 'speak runner'

A University of Glasgow team has designed a new light-based language for self-driving cars — to keep the city's joggers safe without breaking their stride.

By Henry Davenport

Glasgow's joggers, take note: the next car that fails to give way to you on Great Western Road may not have a driver to glower at.

A new study led by the University of Glasgow has found that self-driving cars will need to learn a whole new visual vocabulary if they are to share the road safely with runners — and the team has designed exactly that.

Researchers at the University's School of Computing Science, working with colleagues at KAIST in South Korea, used augmented-reality headsets to stage life-sized encounters between pedestrians and a simulated autonomous vehicle (AV). The results, they say, should reshape how driverless cars are trained to behave around the world's most popular form of exercise.

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Science

Glasgow's REACT Centre catches Westminster's eye for sustainable electronics push

A visit from MP Martin Rhodes puts the city's £6m clean-tech hub in the national spotlight — and Glasgow's green-jobs ambitions with it

By Henry Davenport

Glasgow's quiet revolution in sustainable electronics stepped into the Westminster spotlight last week, when Martin Rhodes MP toured the city's REACT Centre to see how local researchers are turning discarded gadgets into gold — quite literally.

The University of Glasgow-led centre, whose name stands for Responsible Electronics and Circular Technologies, laid on a programme of demonstrations for the visiting parliamentarian, from low-waste circuit-board manufacturing to a high-throughput recycling rig designed to recover gold, gallium and other critical materials from old devices.

For a city with a long industrial memory, it was a notably modern sort of show-and-tell.

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What's On Glasgow

Eric Rushton brings award-winning 'Innkeeper' to The Stand

The Sean Lock Award winner stops in Glasgow on Monday with a show about depression, the Nativity, and finding the right antidepressants

By Helen Cooper

If you fancy a Monday night that's a cut above the usual, comedian Eric Rushton rolls into The Stand Comedy Club on 18 May with his much-praised new hour, Innkeeper — and the early word from Edinburgh is that it's a bit of a treat.

Rushton is one of those quietly devastating stand-ups the circuit has been buzzing about for a couple of years now. He was the inaugural recipient of Channel 4's Sean Lock Comedy Award in 2023, a Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year winner, and a nominee at the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Best Show. The British Comedy Guide listed Innkeeper among the best-reviewed shows of the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe.

In Rushton's own cheerfully bleak words on his tour page, it's "my new show about depression and the Nativity". The hook, as he tells it, is that he was cast in his primary school Nativity play as a child, absolutely smashed it, and promptly retired from acting — only to find his way back to a stage now that he's "found the correct antidepressants to get back in to show business".

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Community Glasgow

Voices from Gaza: Glasgow University project gives young Palestinian writers a global stage

A blog curated in partnership between the University of Glasgow and the Islamic University of Gaza is publishing poetry, fiction and essays from more than 30 student contributors

By Helen Cooper

Some writers walk for two hours just to find a phone signal. Others charge their handsets wherever they can, then tap out poems and short stories on cracked screens before sending them to a WhatsApp group in Glasgow.

That is how the work reaches Voices from Gaza, a blog developed by the University of Glasgow and the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) that has, in a matter of months, become a small but striking literary home for more than 30 young Palestinian writers.

The project launched last October as an offshoot of the British Council-funded LINEs for Palestine initiative, pioneered by Dr Nazmi Abdel-Salam Al-Masri, professor of languages and curriculum studies at IUG and an honorary fellow at Glasgow's School of Education.

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What's On Glasgow

A Parting Glass for an Old Friend: Karine Polwart's 'Windblown' Bids Farewell to a 200-Year-Old Palm

The five-star folk-theatre meditation passed through Glasgow's Pavilion last weekend — and gets one final Scottish outing in Perth on Saturday

By Henry Davenport

There is something profoundly unfashionable, in this clattering age, about sitting in a darkened theatre to mourn a tree. And yet that, in essence, is what Karine Polwart has been asking Scottish audiences to do — and, by all accounts, they have been doing it gladly, and through tears.

Windblown, the singer-songwriter's luminous new folk-theatre piece, is a "parting glass" — her phrase — to a 200-year-old Sabal palm carried from Bermuda to Scotland in the early 1800s and tended, across nine generations, by the gardeners who loved it. The tree is now facing what Polwart's producers Raw Material bluntly call "its chainsaw demise". Before it goes, she has given it a song.

Beneath a sculpted canopy of palm fronds, accompanied live by the pianist Dave Milligan, Polwart gives voice to the palm itself, tracing its extraordinary life and final days. The themes are weighty — colonial legacy, ecological care, grief, resilience — but the touch is feather-light.

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