Try to wrap a football in aluminium foil and you will discover that you have to crumple up the foil to make it fit snugly to the ball. In the same way it is impossible to represent the curved surface ...

Every map starts with the same lie: The earth is flat. The globe isn’t a portable, affordable, or even satisfying way to look at the world, so these exaggerations are necessary. However, mapmakers ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. World maps distort size and shape by design. Learn why projections matter and how they shape global understanding. (CREDIT: ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The African Union is officially fed up with the 16 ...

In classrooms, offices, and libraries across the United States, one world map appears again and again: the Mercator projection. Its familiarity makes it feel authoritative, even though it was never ...

When this world map was charted in the 1600s according to the Mercator’s projection, the idea was that ships could use the lines of longitude and latitude as a from of navigation. The flat map, ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...