Unicode 6.1 support the full diversity of languages around the world.
Latest version adds characters to support additional languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa.
It also addresses educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new characters have been added. For full details, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for emoji characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred display styles between text and emoji styles. For example:
26FA FE0E U+26FA+U+FE0E/ TENT text style
26FA FE0F U+26FA+U+FE0F/ TENT emoji style
26FD FE0E U+26FD+U+FE0E/ FUEL PUMP text style
26FD FE0F U+26FD+U+FE0F/ FUEL PUMP emoji style

Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will be finalized in February:

* UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
* UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing

With the release, all of you ASCII artists that have been creating piles of poo by hand (gloves?) can now breathe a sigh of relief. What used to take you hundreds of keystrokes can now be accomplished with one tap of your finger. We are sure you feel relieved by this development.

As most of the tutorials use md5, people go on using md5 but they dont know that
it is so unsecure.

Best way is to use SHA2 Family which is way more secure.

eg.

$salt = 'The sky is blue and all the trees are green';
$data = array_map('mysql_real_escape_string', $_POST);
$password = sha1($data['password'].$salt);
$password = hash('sha256', $salt . $password );

Good example

NOTE: Try to keep your salt as unique as possible... most of people use unix timestamp