Recently by Lena Weber

The Manchester Science Festival took place last week, and the IOP contributed through its Science Butlers, Physics Busking and by having a stall throughout the week.

I was up there on Saturday to man the IOP stall at Arndale Market. The stall was quite curiously located between a nail studio, an afro-hair salon and an Indian head massage place. Despite my initial concerns that not many people might come my way, I'd run out of freebees within ten minutes. Lot's of shoppers were curious to find a physics stall and came up to find out more, sparking many conversations about physics and physics education.

Yesterday Jim Al-Kahlili was at the IOP to film a clip for the BBC One Show about new Bond film A Quantum of Solace. There have been quite a few enquiries at the IOP about the film's physics related title, but this time the film crew wanted to know whether Jim felt the Bond baddies' use of physics was giving science a bad name.

From Ernst Blofeld who tried to blackmail the world with two stolen atomic bombs in Thunderball, only to try his luck at germ warfare in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, to Hugo Drax who threatened to blow up London with a nuclear missile in Moonraker, science has always been at the centre of the Bond villains' plot to gain wealth and power.

However, as Jim pointed out, Bond is a man of science himself and fights his opponents with expert use of gadgets and information technology. So really, in the end, it's simply the better scientist who wins, and so far this has always been 007.