Three to see at Manchester Science Festival

Manchester Science Festival returns for the 6th year running this weekend. The nine-day extravaganza, produced by the Museum of Science and Industry, features over 100 events across the city. Comedy, dance, art and hands-on family-friendly activities all get a look in. Here are our top 3 picks of the festival.

Comedy: Bright Club 
Described by the Guardian as ‘the thinking person’s comedy night’, Bright Club throws comedians and musicians together with academics and researchers, telling short, fascinating and funny talks on their areas of expertise. This vein of intelligent, science-based comedy is having quite a moment, with shows such as Brian Cox, Robin Ince and Ben Goldacre’s Infinite Monkey Cage selling out the Apollo last year. Following last year’s sell out, Bright Club comes to new venue Gorilla this year. Not to be missed. Thu 1 Nov, Gorilla, 54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester, M1 5WW,  7.30 – 10.15pm, £7, tickets

Immersive theatre: The Turing Project
Inventive theatre company Simply Told presents an immersive experience set in the world of the wartime code-breaker Alan Turing. The Turing Project poses the question at the heart of the Turing Test, the test to determine if a machine can truly attain artificial intelligence: can a machine fool someone into thinking it is human? Sat 27- Mon 29 Oct, MOSI, Liverpool Road, Castlefield, M3 4FP, noon – 9pm, £5, tickets

Film: Pop-Up Cinema
MOSI’s 1830 railway warehouse was transformed into a pop-up cinema for the Manchester Weekender a fortnight ago and returns for a series of critically acclaimed sci-fi film screenings, including Dimensions (Sat 27 Oct), an independently produced time travel film set in the 1920s, which was voted Best Film 2012 at the 37th Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and sounds like a must for steampunk fans. Also showing is the Ethan Hawke/Jude Law clone-off Gattaca (Mon 29 Oct, pictured), the atmospheric, unsettling space drama Moon (Sun 4 Nov), and Stephen Soderburgh’s exemplary plague thriller Contagion (Fri 2 Nov) – all of which will be introduced by experts exploring the themes of the films. MOSI, Liverpool Road, Castlefield, Manchester, M3 4FP, 6.30pm, £5. Click the links above for tickets.

Sat 27 Oct – Sun 4 Nov, www.manchestersciencefestival.com