One of the intriguing aspects of the (chemical) Internet is its interaction with the computer (operating systems) used to access it. I have long considered this coupling to be far weaker than it should be. So it was with interest that I noted some announcements by Apple Computer and their forthcoming next version OS (which also presages the Windows "Longhorn"). The two aspects that caught my eye are at http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/searchtechnology.html which is a) adding rich metadata to the basic file system to make finding files easier and b) coupling RSS into its browser (and hence possibly the underlying OS itself). The thought struck me that this has the potential for solving one problem which seems to have struck like a pernicious virus these last few years, and which I have noted on this forum previously, namely a profusion of "shrink wrapped" scientific content in the form of PDF (Acrobat) files increasingly littering our computers, about which the only thing we know for certain is the often inscrutable file name (we dont even really know if any given file contains "chemistry"). The theory is that e.g. RSS would deliver the metadata, including bibliographic information (using eg PRISM-RSS), chemical information (CMLRSS), Math information (MathML-RSS) etc, and that any "shrink wrapped" PDF file would be associated with this information by the OS. Thereafter, a "search" on one's computer would immediately reveal this associated information, and one could then find eg "all Acrobat files authored by A on chemical topic B written in 2004 and containing a chemcal substructure C. Well, that is a bit off, but it would mean that one's computer could finally become a proper scientific instrument, rather than a depository of confusion as it often is nowadays. A pipe dream perhaps! If anyone else has any other ideas on how to couple science with the instrument almost invariably now used to retrieve it, do let this forum know. -- Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept. +44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax)