This week, how scientists could use private data to carry out research.

You know, this is incredibly sensitive information, and for good reasons, there are restrictions on who can access it and how.

And what 15 years of fighting malaria has achieved and what the future holds.

The big danger here, I think, is complacency.

Plus, how to twist a travelling neutron.

This is the Nature Podcast for September 24, 2015.

I'm Adam Levy.

And I'm Noah Baker.

Whenever you fill in a tax return, go to the doctors or get a paycheck, data are gathered about your life.

These kinds of administrative data are a rich resource for a wealth of research, but there's a problem.

The data are private. Although possible, getting your hands on private data is hard,

with strict protocols limiting access. With public concerns rising over commercial uses,

is there a way that researchers could use these kinds of data in a responsible

and helpful way? I called up reporter Erica Check-Haden, who's written a feature on this very

subject. First off, I asked what kinds of research could be done with data like these.

A lot of this work has been spearheaded by an economist named Raj Chetty. He and some other

economists, they wanted to look back at the results of this education

study that was done way back decades ago when children in Tennessee were randomly

assigned to different classrooms in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade.

And the idea of that experiment had just been

to measure various things about how the early childhood experience can influence the child's

sort of future educational attainment. And one of the things they found was that, you know,

...