Readers may not at first recognize the latest transformation of the former quarterly journal Impact of Science on Society, published in Paris (1950–1993) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco). After three book-length editions of an intervening biennial, World Science Report (last published in 1998), the newest version has just made its appearance in the UN’s scienceagency output. The volume looks a winner among the UN system’s many specialized publications. What this book sets out to do, and what it accomplishes most pleasingly, is to catalogue — by region or country — how science teaching and research and development are organized, how and with what they are done, and with what semblance of priority where this can be established. Independent specialists from different world areas are the authors of authoritative contributions, with texts, statistics and supporting graphics collated intelligently into a single, coherent and highly useful study. Unesco has produced, in effect, an almanac of world science — the whole introduced by a 24-page Introduction researched and written by theoretical physicist Peter Tindemans of Global Strategies and Partnerships, a consultancy in the Netherlands. As one would expect, the Report rightly makes much of the economic factor known as the gross expenditure on R&D (GERD), a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) that has slowly slipped in value in Europe and North America during much of the past decade, but risen significantly in Asia (27.9% in 1997, overall, to 31.5% in 2002) — a net rise “driven largely by China’s dynamism”. Yet the report notes, astonishingly, that Japan’s share of the world’s GERD fell between 1997 and 2002, from 15.2% to 12.8%. The lesson is: keep your sciencepolicy eyes on Asia. South Asia (which here includes Iran and Mongolia) is covered in a professional overview by V V Krishna and Usha Krishna. They relate that, while 26.6% of the science and engineering students in higher education today are women, the female population in R&D organizations averages only 18.6%. India is moving ahead fast in all respects, however, having had for some years a promisingly high rate of researchers and technologists (women included) emerging from the universities and specialized institutions. While all of this region’s countries remain economically dependent on agriculture, the authors foresee “rapid transformation” coming in this respect, in part with the aid of the World Bank and other lenders, during the years 2006 to 2015. The chapters on Europe, North America and Japan speak easily for themselves. The last, written by social economist Okubo Yoshiko and science-policy expert Kobayashi Shinichi, points out that since the 1990s Nippon has “undergone a paradigm shift from ‘science, technology and society’ to ‘science and technology for society’”. As to the Arab world, chronically lagging behind in terms of most scientific advance, zoologist and former Jordanian prime minister Adnan Badran comments that for this zone to “thrive, it must become part of the global knowledge and information society ... knowledge-driven and interdependent”.