In the game of discovering a single, quintessential web site to demonstrate the cutting edge of contemporary academia, it would be hard to do better than "A Comic Book Periodic Table" (http://www.uky.edu/~holler/periodic/periodic.html), which consists of an art gallery of comic-book cartoons hyperlinked to almost every chemical element.

Click on one of the elements in the Periodic Table, and the relevant cartoon appears. Yes, even Ruthenium. I now know that the centrefold of Metal Men comic (June, 1964) had a little picture of the cheeky little element standing in a queue behind Protactinium and Rubidium.

Here's Erbium, attempting to sabotage a spaceship in Thunderbolts comic (Sept, 1977). Someone makes a joke about Lanthanum in Platinum Grit (Feb, 1995), and Osmium crops up in the May, 1967 episode of Metamorpho. I'm not sure why clicking on "Zinc" takes us to a picture of Tintin congratulating a scientist called Decimus Phostle for discovering a new metal called Phostlite. And where are Halon and Thulium?

The site is the brainchild of a couple of chemists from the University of Kentucky, and has the quasi-serious purpose of showing the influence of chemistry on comic book heroes, from the Flash in the 1940s to the Fantastic Four in modern times.

"When comic books began to find their popularity in the 1940s, chemistry was a new-frontier type of thing that people were afraid of" according to Jack Selegue, professor of the university's chemistry department, who has also published research on "Syntheses and Structures of Two Trifluoroacetate-trapped Derivatives of a Ruthenium Butatrienylidene Complex".

"In the 1940s, you saw characters that became supercharacters because of some kind of strange chemistry event. The Flash, for example, breathed the fumes from hard water, and it gave him these super-speed powers. Jump to the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, the origins of these super types most likely involved some sort of genetic mutation, as in the case of the X-Men. Jump to the present and the origin, as with the Fantastic Four, is cosmic radiation."

©1998 London Daily Telegraph