Blender 2.71 RC is ready

Some features:

• Deforming meshes, such as animated characters including hair, can now be motion blurred
• Initial support for rendering fire and smoke is now available.
• Baking is now supported for Cycles. The tool mimics most of the Blender internal baking functionality, but adapted to Cycles workflow.
• New brush previews for the Texture Paint mode
• Blender can now use “split normals” (i.e. normals per vertex per face) to draw smooth/sharp edges/faces in the 3DView, and both Cycles and BI renderers

See full list of release notes

You can download Blender 2.71 RC1 here.