Researchers from Xi'an Jiaotong University have developed a groundbreaking compressed carbon dioxide (CO₂) energy storage system that achieves unprecedented efficiency while simultaneously generating electricity and cooling energy. The study, published in Frontiers in Energy, introduces a novel gas-liquid phase change approach that eliminates geographical constraints and reduces operating pressures, potentially transforming how commercial facilities and power grids manage renewable energy storage.

Developing environmentalyl friendly and energy-efficient CO₂ adsorbents for post-combustion capture is a critical step toward achieving toward carbon neutrality. While aqueous amines and metal oxides have play pivotal roles in CO₂ capture, their application is limited by issues such as secondary pollution and high energy consumption. In contrast, Zn-based metal-organic frameworks (Zn-based MOFs) have emerged as a green alternative, offering low toxicity reduced regeneration temperatures, and high efficiency in both CO₂ adsorption and catalytic conversion into valuable fuels and chemicals. This mini review begins with a general introduction to MOFs in CO₂ capture and conversion, followed by an overview of early studies on Zn-based MOFs for CO₂ capture. It then summarizes recent research advancements in Zn-based MOFs for integrated CO₂ capture and conversion. Finally, it discusses key challenges and future research directions for post-combustion CO₂ capture and conversion using Zn-based MOFs.

Efficiently capturing multi-scale local information and building long-range dependencies among pixels are essential for medical image segmentation because of the various sizes and shapes of the lesion regions or organs. In this paper, researchers propose the multi-scale cross-axis attention (MCA) mechanism to address these challenges through enhanced axial attention. To address the issues of insufficient learning of positional bias and limited long-distance interaction in axial attention caused by the small dataset, researchers propose using a dual cross-attention mechanism instead of axial attention to enhance global information capture. Meanwhile, to compensate for the lack of explicit attention to local information in axial attention, researchers use multiple convolutions of strip-shaped kernels with different kernel sizes in each axial attention path, which improves the efficiency of MCA in local information encoding. By integrating MCA into the multi-scale cross-axis attention network (MSCAN) backbone, researchers develop their network architecture, termed MCANet. With merely 4 M+ parameters, MCANet outperforms previous heavyweight approaches (e.g., swin transformer-based methods) across four challenging tasks: skin lesion segmentation, nuclei segmentation, abdominal multi-organ segmentation, and polyp segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/haoshao-nku/medical_seg.