The National Institute of Standards and Technology has chosen the five finalists for the last round of its competition to find the next hash function standard. The competition is designed to find a hash algorithm to replace the venerable SHA-1 function, which has been found to be susceptible to collision attacks. The Skein function is the sole U.S. finalist in the SHA-3 competition, and was developed by a large team of cryptographers. The comment period for the finalists will be open until the end of 2011.
Source: https://threatpost.com/nist-announces-sha-3-hash-function-finalists-121010/74764/