Three people - including two police officers - have been killed in an explosion in Moscow, Russian authorities have said. Two traffic police officers saw a suspicious individual near a police car on the city's Yeletskaya Street, and when they approached the suspect to detain him, an explosive device was detonated, Russia's Investigative Committee has said. The two police officers died from their injuries, along with another individual who was standing nearby. The attack comes two days after a senior Russian general was killed in a car bombing in the capital on Monday. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov died after an explosive device - which had been planted under a car - was detonated.

Automatically determining whether a text and a corresponding image are semantically aligned is a significant challenge for vision-language models, with applications in generative text-to-image and image-to-text tasks. In this work, we study methods for automatic text-image alignment evaluation. We first introduce SeeTRUE: a comprehensive evaluation set, spanning multiple datasets from both text-to-image and image-to-text generation tasks, with human judgements for whether a given text-image pair is semantically aligned. We then describe two automatic methods to determine alignment: the first involving a pipeline based on question generation and visual question answering models, and the second employing an end-to-end classification approach by finetuning multimodal pretrained models. Both methods surpass prior approaches in various text-image alignment tasks, with significant improvements in challenging cases that involve complex composition or unnatural images. Finally, we demonstrate how our approaches can localize specific misalignments between an image and a given text, and how they can be used to automatically re-rank candidates in text-to-image generation.

Three killed after Russia launches'massive' attack across Ukraine Russia carried out a massive overnight attack on several Ukrainian cities, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, a day after he warned of strikes over the Christmas period. At least three people were killed, according to Ukrainian officials, including a four-year-old child, while energy infrastructure was also targeted, leaving several regions without power. Russia launched 635 drones and 38 missiles, Ukraine's air force said, adding that 621 of them were downed. Zelensky said people simply want to be with their families, at home, and safe in the run-up to Christmas, and said the strikes sent an extremely clear signal about Russia's priorities despite ongoing peace talks. He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin still cannot accept that he must stop killing.

Vince Zampella, who co-created the widely-popular video game Call of Duty, has died in a single-vehicle Ferrari crash in California, aged 55. Zampella's death was confirmed by Electronic Arts, which owns Respawn Entertainment, a game studio he co-founded. This is an unimaginable loss, and our hearts are with Vince's family, his loved ones, and all those touched by his work, a spokesperson for Electronic Arts told the BBC. Officials said the person on the vehicle's passenger seat was ejected while the driver remained trapped. It is unclear if Zampella was driving the car.

Storing data in synthetic DNA offers the possibility of improving information density and durability by several orders of magnitude compared to current storage technologies. However, DNA data storage requires a computationally intensive process to retrieve the data. In particular, a crucial step in the data retrieval pipeline involves clustering billions of strings with respect to edit distance. Datasets in this domain have many notable properties, such as containing a very large number of small clusters that are well-separated in the edit distance metric space. In this regime, existing algorithms are unsuitable because of either their long running time or low accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel distributed algorithm for approximately computing the underlying clusters.

Plus: California's AI safety bill has passed into law Wrinkles and gray hairs aside, it can be difficult to know how well--or poorly--someone's body is truly aging. A person who develops age-related diseases earlier in life, or has other biological changes associated with aging, might be considered "biologically older" than a similar-age person who doesn't have those changes. Some 80-year-olds will be weak and frail, while others are fit and active. Over the past decade, scientists have been uncovering new methods of looking at the hidden ways our bodies are aging. And what they've found is changing our understanding of aging itself. Can we repair the internet?

Plus: China's on a mission to crack down on Nvidia's China-specific chips How do our bodies remember? "Like riding a bike" is shorthand for the remarkable way that our bodies remember how to move. Most of the time when we talk about muscle memory, we're not talking about the muscles themselves but about the memory of a coordinated movement pattern that lives in the motor neurons, which control our muscles. Yet in recent years, scientists have discovered that have a memory for movement and exercise. And the more we move, as with riding a bike or other kinds of exercise, the more those cells begin to make a memory of that exercise. This piece is part of MIT Technology Review Explains: our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next.

Plus: OpenAI and Nvidia's circular deals are drawing some heat The US Department of Energy appears poised to terminate funding for a pair of large carbon-sucking factories that were originally set to receive more than $1 billion in government grants, according to a department-issued list of projects obtained by and circulating among federal agencies. One of the projects is the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, a facility that Occidental Petroleum's 1PointFive subsidiary planned to develop in Kleberg County, Texas. The other is Project Cypress in Louisiana, a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom. AI toys are all the rage in China--and now they're appearing on shelves in the US too Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children's playthings with chatbots and voice assistants. It's a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts that the sector will surpass ¥100 billion ($14 billion) by 2030, growing faster than almost any other branch of consumer AI.

Every year, the newsroom produces a list of some of the most promising climate tech firms on the planet. It's an exercise that we hope brings positive attention to companies working to decarbonize major sectors of the economy, whether by spinning up new, cleaner sources of energy or reinventing how we produce foods and distribute goods. Though the political and funding landscape has shifted dramatically in the US since last year, nothing has altered the urgency of the climate dangers the world now faces--we need to rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. This project highlights the firms making progress toward that end. Check out the third annual edition of the list, and learn more about why we selected these companies . It's a foregone conclusion that the world will not meet the goals for limiting emissions and global warming laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The Download: using AI to discover "zero day" vulnerabilities, and Apple's ICE app removal Microsoft says AI can create "zero day" threats in biology A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a zero day vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA. These screening systems are designed to stop people from purchasing genetic sequences that could be used to create deadly toxins or pathogens. But now researchers say they have figured out how to bypass the protections in a way previously unknown to defenders. Now we've got to see if they work . The US Attorney General requested it take down ICEBlock--and Apple complied. Its alerts about teenagers' concerning conversations also took hours to deliver.