Good news: According to new research by Washington University’s Mark Rank, PhD, and Cornell University, there’s a 1-in-9 chance that a typical American will join the wealthiest 1 percent for at least a year of one’s working life. The bad news: Only an elite few get to stay in that economic stratosphere — and nonwhite workers face far longer odds.

Analyzing every marijuana-related Twitter message sent during a one-month period in early 2014, researchers at the School of Medicine have found that the “Twitterverse” is a pot-friendly place. In that time, more than 7 million tweets referenced marijuana, with 15 times as many pro-pot tweets sent as anti-pot tweets.

In a digital world, we often overlook the important ways in which privacy is necessary to protect cherished civil liberties such as free speech. Most laws enacted to protect online privacy pose no serious burden to public debate, argues Washington University privacy law expert Neil Richards, JD. His book, “Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age,” was published this week.

A three-dimensional seismic image of the mantle beneath the Lau Basin in the South Pacific has an intriguing anomaly — the least magma where scientists expected to find the most. After considerable debate, the team led by Arts & Sciences researchers concluded that magma with a high water content was flushed so rapidly that it wasn’t showing up in the images. The image was just published in Nature.