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Nowadays, the rapidly growing population, climate change, and environment pollution put heavy pressure on fresh water resources. The atmosphere is the immense worldwide and available water source. The Adsorptive Water Harvesting from the Atmosphere (AWHA) method is considered a promising alternative to desalination technologies for remote arid regions. The development of novel adsorbents with advanced water-adsorption properties is a prerequisite for practical realization of this method. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a novel class of porous crystalline solids that bring a great potential for AWHA due to their extremely high specific surface area, porosity, and tailored adsorption properties. This work addresses MIL-160 as a water adsorbent for AWHA. The water-adsorption equilibrium of MIL-160 was studied by volumetric method, the isosteric heat of adsorption was calculated, and finally, the potential of MIL-160 for AWHA was evaluated for climatic conditions of the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, the Sahara, Atacama, and Mojave as reference arid regions. MIL-160 was shown to ensure a maximum specific water productivity of 0.31–0.33 gH2O/gads per cycle. High fractions of water extracted (0.90–0.98) and collected (0.48–0.97) could be achieved at a regeneration temperature of 80 °C with natural cooling of the condenser by ambient air. The specific energy consumption for water production varied from 3.5 to 6.8 kJ/g, which is acceptable if solar heat is used to drive the desorption. The AWHA method employing MIL-160 is a promising way to achieve a fresh water supply in remote arid areas.

BackgroundNew approach for treating cancer is to influence on vital genes for tumors. A number of attempts have led to discovery candidate genes that are mean to be essential for surviving of tumor cells of different types. In this work, we tried to analyze genes that were previously found to be essential for melanoma surviving. We performed transient siRNA-mediated knockdown of UNC45A, STK11IP, RHPN2 and ZNFX1 in melanoma cell line A375. After that, we checked cell viability, proliferation and migrating rate in vitro.MethodsFor knockdown of the genes we used siRNA mediated interference. To deliver siRNA in cells we used transfection by Metafectene PRO. Cell viability and proliferation assessed by MTT assay. Cell migration was assessed by wound healing assay. Knockdown of genes was evaluated via RT-qPCR analysis.ResultsOur results indicate that knockdown of the genes leads to no statistically significant changes in cell survival according to viability assay. However, mobility assay shows that knockdown of each of the target genes accelerates the speed of cells migrating.ConclusionOur results do not confirm the hypothesis. Possible explaining of such controversial results could be in insufficient bioinformatical analysis or in need of multiplex knockdown of the genes.

Taking into account that construction is one of the resource-intensive economic sectors, which is reflected in natural capital consumption and taking out the land resources from the turnover, it significantly affects the environmental situation. The conducted review of the previous research in the environmental analysis confirms the importance of the aforementioned problem and the urgency of research continuation to develop a tool for the environmental subsystem management in terms of companies’ sustainable development management. As a uniting tool for quantitative and qualitative analytical methods providing the basis for the choice and implementation of the strategy taking into account environmental requirements, we proposed a method for building of a construction company environmental profile, a scorecard with specific indicators underlying such profile as well as approaches for their reference level formation. To ensure the growth of the companies' environmental responsibility, it was proposed to increase the range of the estimated figures used for the formation of the construction companies' rankings including the environmental indicators into the system alongside with the economic and social figures with the account of the achieved outcomes both on the basis of the instantaneous and rate indicators.