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 ...

One of the grandfathers of modern navigation Gerardus Mercator is being rightly celebrated in Google Doodle form today in honour of his 503rd birthday. Born in modern-day Belgium in 1512, Mercator in ...

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 ...

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There is an episode in The West Wing television series in which White House press spokesperson CJ Craig meets a delegation of cartographers, who explain that the standard world map — a Mercator ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Children in Boston’s public schools were introduced to a new world map last week, offering a comparison to the traditional Mercator projection map commonly used in classrooms. Boston’s public schools ...

Gerardus Mercator changed the way we see the world. Of how many men can that be said so literally? He was born 500 years ago in Flanders, studied astronomy and mathematics, and drew his first major ...

Because the Earth is roughly spherical, every flat map distorts our planet one way or another. The most popular version is the Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in ...

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 ...