Wnt/β-catenin signaling plays important roles in many developmental processes, including neural crest-derived melanocyte development. Here we show that cardamonin, a calchone from
Aplinia katsumadai ...Hayata, inhibited pigmentation in melanocytes through suppression of Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. Cardamonin significantly suppressed the expression of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) and tyrosinase, which are melanocyte differentiation-associated markers, in human normal melanocytes, thereby decreasing intracellular melanin production. In addition, cardamonin promoted the degradation of intracellular β-catenin that was accumulated by Wnt3a-conditioned medium (Wnt3a CM) or bromoindirubin-3′-oxime (BIO), a glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β) inhibitor, in HEK293 reporter cells and human normal melanocytes. Our findings indicate that cardamonin may be a potential whitening agent for use in cosmetics and in the medical treatment of hyperpigmentation disorders.
During a military operation, the nature of command and control (C2) depends primarily on the intuition of a human commander. If the quality and timing of decision making leads to decisions, good ...commanders should be able to distinguish between decisions that require urgent responses and those to which responses can be delayed. However, current Republic of Korea military doctrine emphasizes only the speed of decision making and operations, regardless of command type. Hence, we investigate the design parameters for command timing such as decision-making time and ordering/reporting cycle during the offensive operation of a mechanized infantry brigade. We build a simulation model of the brigade's operations that comprises detailed C2 process models. Next, we use the Taguchi method to identify command timing that both optimizes performance and is robust to combat-related noise factors. The results demonstrate that rapid command times do not always correlate with high combat effectiveness. The results are also compared with those using the Latin hypercube design, which also support the insight we found using the Taguchi method although the Taguchi method was better at finding optimal parameter setting in this case. The findings of simulation-based virtual experiments and optimization processes offer guidelines for the detailed design of C2 activities.
Predicting volatility is important for asset predicting, option pricing and hedging strategies because it cannot be directly observed in the financial market. The Black-Scholes option pricing model ...is one of the most widely used models by market participants. Notwithstanding, the Black-Scholes model is based on heavily criticized theoretical premises, one of which is the constant volatility assumption. The dynamics of the volatility surface is difficult to estimate. In this paper, we establish a novel architecture based on physics-informed neural networks and convolutional transformers. The performance of the new architecture is directly compared to other well-known deep-learning architectures, such as standard physics-informed neural networks, convolutional long-short term memory (ConvLSTM), and self-attention ConvLSTM. Numerical evidence indicates that the proposed physics-informed convolutional transformer network achieves a superior performance than other methods.
