Manchester Science Festival: Nine days of big bangs, quantum physics, comedy and much more

Festival: Manchester Science Festival, various venues, Manchester, October 27 – November 4 2012.Manchester is a city with its finger on the pulse of science; John Dalton, James Joule, Ernest Rutherford and Bernard Lovell are all proudly owned as the city’s scientific sons and the Manchester Science Festival celebrates this rich legacy with nine days of events taking place across Greater Manchester.An incredible range of exhibitions, activities and events is on offer this year; from talks, such as The Battle for the Internet, to night-time events like The City Dark, which tells the story of light pollution and disappearing stars. Many blend the beauty of art and science – such as Think, Feel, Move: The Science of Movement, which combines the elegance of dance and quantifying movement. Children are spoilt for choice this half-term with loads of events aimed at engaging and inspiring younger minds. Among them author Mark Griffiths will be reading from his latest book Space Lizards ate my Sister – there is also an opportunity to meet some real-life lizards. One exhibition aimed at kids that will not be akin to pulling teeth is Gina Czarnecki’s Palaces. The four-foot sculpture constructed out of baby teeth explains the use of waste body parts in stem cell regeneration. Children are encouraged to donate their baby teeth to the palace, and to leave a letter for the tooth fairy.The festival also offers the chance to celebrate Alan Turing, the man credited with inventing the first modern computer and decoding German ciphers during the Second World War. Commissioned by GCHQ, the event marks the 100th birthday of this father of computer science.There is even the opportunity to unite history and modern technology as festival goers are invited to encrypt a message on one of the original GCHQ wartime Enigma machines, have it decrypted using the Turing Bombe Rebuild machine at Bletchley Park, and then see the message ‘tweeted’ back.