Interesting post here
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/10/he....html#comments
It seems that a group of researchers has constructed a Calabi-Yau compactification that reproduces that particles of the standard model. The also obtain the SO(10) GUT group, and seem to get rid of some of it's less usefull properties (like Higgs triplets).
Could this be a new boost for String Theory? I'm fairly new at all this, so any insights any of you could give would be appreciated.