How to monitor the blockchain for new blocks I want to scan new transactions as they are added to the block chain. 

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do this. Are there any APIs that allow for this? Or is there a way to directly tap into the bitcoin network with ruby?
Full disclosure, I'm BlockCypher's Developer Advocate. We have both a WebSockets/WebHooks API for unconfirmed transactions, which you can read about here, along with a Ruby example: http://dev.blockcypher.com/?ruby#using-webhooks . 

But if you wanted to run a local implementation that's primarily Ruby-based, you could try Coinbase's Toshi, or bitcoin-ruby:


https://github.com/coinbase/toshi
https://github.com/lian/bitcoin-ruby