  The extreme conditions found in and around pulsars make them fantastic
natural laboratories, providing insights to a rich variety of fundamental
physics and astronomy. To discover more pulsars we have begun the High Time
Resolution Universe (HTRU) survey: a blind survey of the northern sky with the
100-m Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany and a twin survey of the southern
sky with the 64-m Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The HTRU is an
international collaboration with expertise shared among the MPIfR in Germany,
ATNF/CASS and Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, University of
Manchester in the UK and INAF in Italy. The HTRU survey uses multi-beam
receivers and backends constructed with recent advancements in technology,
providing unprecedentedly high time and frequency resolution, allowing us to
probe deeper into the Galaxy than ever before. While a general overview of HTRU
has been given by Keith at this conference, here we focus on three further
aspects of HTRU discoveries and highlights. These include the `Diamond-planet
pulsar' binary PSR J1719-1438 and a second similar system recently discovered.
In addition, we provide specifications of the HTRU-North survey and an update
of its status. In the last section we give an overview of the search for
highly-accelerated binaries in the Galactic plane region. We discuss the
computational challenges arising from the processing of the petabyte-sized HTRU
survey data. We present an innovative segmented search technique which aims to
increase our chances of discovering highly accelerated relativistic binary
systems, potentially including pulsar-black-hole binaries.
