Rubenerd

In 2007, it seemed all we read about in crypto circles were successful attacks against the MD5 and SHA family of hashing algorithms. Well after a six year contest, NIST is about ready to announce a suitable replacement to be dubbed SHA-3.

Interestingly, Bruce Schneier isn't so enthusiastic:

It’s not that the new hash functions aren’t any good, it’s that we don’t really need one. [..] We didn’t know [in 2006] how long the various SHA-2 variants would remain secure. But it’s 2012, and SHA-512 is still looking good.

That said, Skein and it's Threefish block cipher look really intriguing. I eschewed Rijndael/AES and use Twofish for all my personal crypto.