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Even as research continues to show that a college education offers a sound investment, more Americans are starting to doubt the efficacy of a higher education. Despite compelling evidence, scholars, public policy professionals, and legislators continue to debate the personal and societal benefits of higher education policy, with many casting doubt on the long-term value proposition. But a new report suggests that many of the conclusions that focus on the economic output are limited. Today, college graduates have more close friends, are more likely to be married, and are less likely to feel lonely than those without higher education. College-educated Americans are also more likely to spend time in 'third places' (bars, coffee shops, parks, etc.) and develop a more extensive network of acquaintances, activity partners, and place-based friends--offering a stronger social support system. The college connection is evident in religious spaces as well. College graduates today are far more likely to be involved in church or places of worship than their counterparts without a college degree., In a time of surging student loan debt, the benefits of a college education have once again become the subject of scrutiny and public debate. For younger Americans, the lesson [...]

Using electrical transport experiments and shot noise thermometry, we find strong evidence that "supercollision" scattering processes by flexural modes are the dominant electron-phonon energy transfer mechanism in high-quality, suspended graphene around room temperature. The power law dependence of the electron-phonon coupling changes from cubic to quintic with temperature. The change of the temperature exponent by two is reflected in the quadratic dependence on chemical potential, which is an inherent feature of two-phonon quantum processes., Comment: 11 + 4 pages, 2 + 3 figures

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Americans across the country to reconsider their community preferences. Today, many Americans would prefer to live in small towns or rural areas rather than denser urban neighborhoods, and they are more likely to prioritize personal space over access to community amenities. When it comes to rating their communities, White Americans are more positive about their neighborhoods than are Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. But White Americans are also less optimistic about the future of their communities than other groups are. Forty-three percent of Asian Americans, 42 percent of Black Americans, and 39 percent of Hispanic Americans say their communities will get better in the near future, compared to 30 percent of White Americans. Many Americans live close to at least some local amenities. Close proximity to amenities such as cafes and parks increases neighborliness, feelings of safety, social trust, and positive feelings about the community. For Americans living in urban and suburban areas, greater amenity access is linked to higher levels of trust. More than three-quarters of high-amenity urbanites (76 percent) and suburbanites (77 percent) trust their neighbors at least a fair amount, compared to 62 percent and 60 percent of those living in low-amenity cities and suburbs, respectively. Most (56 percent) Americans have a local spot they regularly visit and are more likely than not to recognize other people there. Americans who have a regular community spot and say they see their neighbors there are more likely than those who do not to feel closely connected to their communities. Policing has been at the forefront of political debate in much of the past year. And while many believe Black Americans and other minorities are treated differently by the police, support for local police forces remains high. Additionally, ideological divides are wider than racial ones are. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of liberals and just 13 percent of conservatives favor cutting police funding and shifting it to social services. About half (53 percent) of Black, 49 percent of Asian, 40 percent of Hispanic, and 31 percent of White Americans support cutting funding for police. Americans do not always feel secure in their neighborhoods, but feelings of personal safety vary widely. About only half (53 percent) the public say they would feel very or somewhat comfortable leaving the door unlocked while they are home. Nearly half (47 percent) say they would not be comfortable leaving their doors unlocked. A majority (62 percent) of White Americans feel comfortable leaving their doors unlocked, but less than half of Black (33 percent), Hispanic (39 percent), and Asian (34 percent) Americans say the same., In their daily lives, Americans do not always fit popular narratives about how they are doing and what they care about. This is particularly true when we examine the ins [...]

Executive Summary The August 2021 American Perspectives Survey (APS) captures division and consensus in the attitudes held by American parents and the public at large on an array of educational [...]

We present a coarse-grained two dimensional mechanical model for the microtubule-tau bundles in neuronal axons in which we remove taus, as can happen in various neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, tauopathies, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Our simplified model includes (i) taus modeled as entropic springs between microtubules, (ii) removal of taus from the bundles due to phosphorylation, and (iii) a possible depletion force between microtubules due to these dissociated phosphorylated taus. We equilibrate upon tau removal using steepest descent relaxation. In the absence of the depletion force, the transverse rigidity to radial compression of the bundle falls to zero at about 60% tau occupancy, in agreement with standard percolation theory results. However, with the attractive depletion force, spring removal leads to a first order collapse of the bundles over a wide range of tau occupancies for physiologically realizable conditions. While our simplest calculations assume a constant concentration of microtubule intercalants to mediate the depletion force, including a dependence that is linear in the detached taus yields the same collapse. Applying percolation theory to removal of taus at microtubule tips, which are likely to be the protective sites against dynamic instability, we argue that the microtubule instability can only obtain at low tau occupancy, from 0.06-0.30 depending upon the tau coordination at the microtubule tips. Hence, the collapse we discover is likely to be more robust over a wide range of tau occupancies than the dynamic instability. We suggest in vitro tests of our predicted collapse., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures

March 13, 2020, may go down as a key inflection point in American economic history. The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered countless businesses, brought economies to a halt, and has killed more [...]

Coming out of a once-in-a-generation global pandemic, Americans appear more attuned than ever to the importance of friendship. However, despite renewed interest in the topic of friendship in popular culture [...]

Phase coherence of charge carriers leads to electron-wave interference in ballistic mesoscopic conductors. In graphene, such Fabry-P\'erot-like interference has been observed, but a detailed analysis has been complicated by the two-dimensional nature of conduction, which allows for complex interference patterns. In this work, we have achieved high-quality Fabry-P\'erot interference in a suspended graphene device, both in conductance and in shot noise, and analyzed their structure using Fourier transform techniques. The Fourier analysis reveals two sets of overlapping, coexisting interferences, with the ratios of the diamonds being equal to the width to length ratio of the device. We attribute these sets to a unique coexistence of longitudinal and transverse resonances, with the longitudinal resonances originating from the bunching of modes with low transverse momentum. Furthermore, our results give insight into the renormalization of the Fermi velocity in suspended graphene samples, caused by unscreened many-body interactions., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Key Points * Americans who are less connected to their community are not disproportionately likely to embrace conspiracy theories. Thirty-nine percent of Americans who belong to at least two community [...]

Key Points * The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an overall decline in religious attendance, although religious identity remained mostly stable. * The number of Americans who never attend religious services jumped [...]

Motivated by the biologically important and complex phenomena of A\beta\ peptide aggregation in Alzheimer's disease, we introduce a model and simulation methodology for studying protein aggregation that includes extra-cellular aggregation, aggregation on the cell-surface assisted by a membrane bound protein, and in addition, supply, clearance, production and sequestration of peptides and proteins. The model is used to produce equilibrium and kinetic-aggregation phase diagrams for aggregation onset and of reduced stable A\beta\ monomer concentrations due to aggregation. The methodology we implemented permits modeling of a phenomenon involving orders of magnitude differences in time scales and concentrations which can be retained in the simulation. We demonstrate how to identify ranges of parameter values that give monomer concentration depletion upon aggregation similar to that observed in Alzheimer's disease. We show how very different behavior can be obtained as reaction parameters and protein concentrations vary, and discuss the difficulty reconciling results of experiments from two vastly different concentration regimes. The latter is an important general issue in relating in-vitro and mice based experiments to humans.