A new version of R was released today. R 3.1.3 also called "Smooth Sidewalk" is expected to be the last release before R's annual release version 3.2. Here is a list of the changed to R included in this most recent release.

NEW FEATURES

• The internal method of download.file() can now handle files larger than 2GB on 32-bit builds which support such files (tested on 32-bit Rrunning on 64-bit Windows).
• kruskal.test() warns on more types of suspicious input.
• The as.dendrogram() method for "hclust" objects gains a check argument protecting against memory explosion for invalid inputs.
• capabilities() has a new item long.double which indicates if the build uses a long double type which is longer than double.
• nlm() no longer modifies the callback argument in place (a new vector is allocated for each invocation, which mimics the implicit duplication that occurred in R < 3.1.0); note that this is a change from the previously documented behavior. (PR#15958)
• icuSetCollate() now accepts locale = "ASCII" which uses the basic C function strcmp and so collates strings byte-by-byte in numerical order.
• sessionInfo() tries to report the OS version in use (not just that compiled under, and including details of Linux distributions).
• model.frame() (used by lm() and many other modelling functions) now warns when it drops contrasts from factors. (Wish of PR#16119)
• install.packages() and friends now accept the value type = "binary" as a synonym for the native binary type on the platform (if it has one).
• Single source or binary files can be supplied for install.packages(type = "both") and the appropriate type and repos = NULL will be inferred.
• New function pcre_config() to report on some of the configuration options of the version of PCRE in use. In particular, this reports if regular expressions using p{xx} are supported.
• (Windows.) download.file(cacheOK = FALSE) is now supported when ‘internet2.dll’ is used.
• browseURL() has been updated to work with Firefox 36.0 which has dropped support for the -remote interface.