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Offering a sneak peak of what will be in the new version, John Resig has released the first in a series of patches to jQuery in preparation for the 1.3 beta release. They are:

• A patch to the .domManip method to use DocumentFragments, resulting in manipulation code (append, prepend, etc.) that is about 15x faster.
• Addition of a .closest(selector) method which starts with the current node and traverses the parents in the DOM tree to match the selector (think "first self or ancestor"):
  

  closest: function( selector ) {
            return this.map(function() {
                var cur = this;
                while ( cur && cur.ownerDocument ) {
                     if ( jQuery(cur).is(selector) )
                        return cur;
                     cur = cur.parentNode;
                }
             });
  }

• A patch to the seminal DOM ready() method that backs off attempting to detect the loading of stylesheets (apparently not possible according to Resig) to normal "document ready" functionality.
• Addition of multiple-namespace support for events.
• A new internal property that keeps track of the selector chain (mainly for use by plug-in authors).

The new jQuery 1.3 will also feature the Sizzle JavaScript CSS selector engine as well as revamped implementations of all the selector-based methods.

You can read all about the new patches in Resig's original post here.

Update: the new Sizzle engine has been added to the 1.3 trunk.