My personal favourite render Blender has gotten to a major milestone the alpha release of the much anticipated 2.5 release.
2.5 is basically a complete from the ground up reworking of the interface and core code to make it more easy to extend and more responsive it also reworks all the data structures so everything in the program is animatable. It also includes some feature upgrades such as smoke simulation better support for volumetrics improvements to the animation and particle systems and a overhaul of the ray tracer that has made it up to 10x faster than in previous versions.
You can download it to play with it but given this is an alpha release it's not without it's issues it took me a few goes before I could get it to run.
They are continuing development with this in parallel to the latest movie Project Durian.