Zooming out on Google Maps no longer shows a flat map

Take a look at a map today, and you might think North America is larger than Africa or Greenland is larger than Mexico and China. 

But that's not true in the slightest. The issue derives from trying to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Luckily for everyone, Google is solving this problem with the latest update to Google Maps.

Google announced Thursday it will begin showing the Earth as a globe rather than a flat "mercator projection" as it formerly had. The result is that when you zoom out all the way in Google Maps, you'll now see a view of the globe from space, rather than the flat map that was previously shown. Read more...