Matt Stiles

While a cure for cancer remains elusive, we already know how to keep many cases of the disease from developing in the first place.

People can reduce cancer risks by keeping a healthful weight and avoiding cigarettes.

But smoking, obesity and other major cancer risk factors remain common, and they ...

The advertisement begins with a breezy acoustic-guitar jingle and a young woman peering into soft light. Its message is clear: The product you're about to see is special.

It's called Spam.

Not the unsolicited email, but the canned, processed pork product introduced during the 1930s. South Koreans eat ...

In recent months, NPR staff has published a series of questions-and-answer stories related to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Now we've compiled them into an interactive so you can explore answers that are most relevant to you.

There are nearly 80 questions, ranging from who's eligible ...

The U.S. Census Bureau keeps a vast and valuable store of anonymous statistics about Americans — their demographics, their neighborhoods, their professions, their households, and more.

Now the agency's putting that information in the palm of your hand.

The bureau on Tuesday announced the release of dwellr, a ...

When NPR launched a national guide to accessible playgrounds two weeks ago, we knew it wasn't perfect.

It's not perfect because there isn't an official, comprehensive database of playgrounds with components designed for kids with special needs available to use as a source.

So we asked you, our ...

Judge Shira Scheindlin has earned a reputation as an outspoken defender of civil liberties and a recurring foil for the New York City police. In her ruling in the closely watched stop-and-frisk case, Scheindlin criticized the police, and said the department discriminated against blacks and Latinos. She also said ...

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Few know Texas' population as well as its official demographer, Lloyd ...

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Texas is a large, diverse state with broad regional differences in population and ...

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Zone Improvement Plan, the network of ZIP codes we use for everything from mail delivery to credit card security.

The U.S. Postal Service began using the five-digit codes on July 1, 1963, hoping they would improve the efficiency and speed of ...

Matt Stiles is data editor on NPR's News Applications team. Follow him on Twitter at @stiles. Erica Ryan (@ericalryan) is a digital news editor.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The U.S. Census Bureau released its list of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties Thursday, and here's what we learned: They're mainly clustered in the South and West, and their rapid population gains are fueled by a wide variety of economic and cultural factors including the energy boom, military realignment, ...

The details remain murky about the NSA's foreign surveillance programs targeting communications and Internet records collected by American companies. So, too, are the terms associated with some of the stories. What, exactly, is "metadata"? What does an "algorithm" do? We've tried to explain a few of these terms ...

Smartphones appear to be increasing the rates in which blacks and Hispanics access the Internet, helping reduce disparities with whites and Asians, a government report said Monday.

The U.S. Census Bureau survey was the first time the agency asked respondents about whether they used smartphones to go online, ...

Google has released a stunning cache of satellite images that show how the globe has changed in recent decades. Thursday's announcement came from the search giant's official blog:

"Working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and TIME, we're releasing more than a ...

Black voters showed up at the polls at higher rates than whites in last year's presidential election, driving the rate of minority participation to historic levels, a new government report shows.

While voting and turnout rates from 2012 were known soon after President Obama's re-election, the survey by the ...

Are you a "mega-commuter"?

That's a term used by the U.S. Census Bureau to describe people who commute at least 90 minutes and 50 miles to work. Nearly 600,000 Americans spend that much time in vehicles, carpool lanes, and trains and buses each day, according to the bureau.

This interactive ...

The immense amounts of data collected by local, state and federal government agencies can be an incredibly valuable trove for enterprising journalists.  It can also be a pointless slog. NPR's StateImpact project database reporting coordinator Matt Stiles and computational journalism professor at Duke Sarah Cohen explain how they find good stories in a sea of government data.