What's your inflation rate?

Consumer prices rose 9.1% from June 2021 to June 2022, the highest rate since 1981. That rate is the average of price increases for more than 200 categories of goods and services, from electricity to haircuts, daycare, rent, ice cream, and much more. Spending on these hundreds of categories depends on a person’s stage in life, meaning Americans of different ages have different inflation rates. 

This new visualization offers granular exploration of spending categories by age. 

• Spending on services reflects how families age: college tuition spending eventually replaces daycare and pre-school expenditures, which is then overtaken by health care spending. 
   
• Televisions and phones are some of the only categories with falling prices. 

These images are just a glimpse of what’s available. Zoom in for data details in this new visualization; find your age group and see if national spending habits match your own.


Budgeting the James Webb Telescope

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have wowed people around the globe. A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb will help scientists search for the first galaxies formed after the creation of the universe, take images of deep space, and much more.

NASA's timeline — and the budget — fluctuated throughout the telescope’s production. See how with this new article.   

• The Webb Telescope initially had a $1 billion budget and a projected launch in 2010. Development began in 2004 — project spending passed $1.2 billion after three years.
   
• Throughout the changes in its funding and launch date projections, the Webb Telescope was between 1.5% and 4.0% of NASA’s total budget. For comparison, NASA’s most expensive project, the International Space Station, which was 5.7% of its FY 2021 expenditures.

Learn about the telescope’s budget and mission right here.


Tracking new COVID-19 variants

New Omicron subvariants can replace old ones so quickly that it can be challenging to keep up with the current state of coronavirus in the US. We’ve updated this visual to help track variants and subvariants dating back to January of this year. 

The Omicron BA.5 subvariant emerged in the US in late April. As of July, it accounted for most COVID-19 cases nationwide.


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