How do you flatten a sphere? For centuries, mapmakers have agonized over how to accurately display our round planet on anything other than a globe. Now, a fundamental re-imagining of how maps can work ...

The economic and man-made resources that sustain human wellbeing are not distributed evenly across the world, but are instead heavily concentrated in cities. Poor access to opportunities and services ...

The idea of a cognitive map was originally proposed by Tolman 1, in an effort to explain navigational behaviors in rodents that could not be logically reduced to associations between specific stimuli ...

Back when mapmaking was still a fledgling profession in the U.S., cartographers had a trick up their sleeves: they would insert fake towns into the maps they drew. Not to screw up travelers trying to ...

Earth is a sphere, so how can it be accurately portrayed on a 2D map? Simply flatten Earth into two pancakes, one depicting the Northern Hemisphere and the other the Southern, with the equator running ...

I usually work on general relativity and cosmology. I have always loved geometrical things. As a kid I was fascinated by map projections. When I was 14, I made a painted globe of Mars based on a flat ...

In the modern era, the European discovery of North American became a proxy for conflicts between American Protestants and Catholics, as well as northern Europeans who claimed Vikings like Leif ...

Release your inner explorer. Here’s a way to relive, commemorate or envision a favorite place in the world by creating an illustrated map. By Nate Padavick Travel and travel planning are being ...

This excerpt is taken from National Geographic’s new book All Over the Map, a guided tour through the world’s most incredible maps, assembled by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, authors of the “All Over ...