Jacob Schuldt has redesigned RC4 to upgrade it to current crytoanalysis knowledge. RC4 itself is very interesting : it seems very simple, being a single rotor encryption but with a self modifying rotor. And even if it leaks some internal state data with each byte it spits out, it stays ahead of analysis. A must know for any serious cryptographer out there. Rivest (obligatory /bow) has worked with Schuldt over this. The RC4 weak parts do remain though : its 256 bytes array seems too low for a modern cypher, and weird to use with 32 and 64 bits processors (will work slowly because of windows to use over fields). The design is beautiful though and it's quite nice to use as a programmer.

During this redesign, we not only have the core but also various functions that surround it so you can turn the cipher into a hash, or as a stream cipher. They have tried all variations for each, and selected the best ones according to resistance to known cryptanalysis techniques. This not only required to try them, but to test them vs. cryptanalysis. This must have required massive amounts of processing power.

Its 8-bit word size is going to make is very interesting for smart card applications.

Two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. Paper of the year.
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-quantum-physics-complicated.html