I sometimes browse arxiv.org and other sites as I think research papers are a great way to get a feel for what's going on at the bleeding edge of some topic.<p>However, I'm certainly not a domain expert in most of these topics, which makes reading these papers difficult. Is there somewhere where I can read summaries about the newest developments in some topic (e.g. math, cosmology, etc.) in layman's terms?
Subscribe to a "serious" popular-science magazine (e.g. Scientific American, or Spektrum der Wissenschaft if you're German). They won't give you a comprehensive overview, but they will pick out recent highlights and offer more in-depth articles on multiple topics, at a level understandable to readers who are scientifically literate but not experts.<p>Also, see if you can find good blogs by researchers in the topics you're interested in. There are some good ones out there (as an ecologist, I like "Ecology for the Masses"). Their spectrum will be a lot narrower than a magazine - constrained by the authors' expertise and interests - but they can be more "bleeding edge".
Read Quanta Magazine:<p><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/</a><p>Brilliant popular science writing about contemporary discoveries in math, computer science, and the physical sciences.
I’d encourage you to just practice “reading academia”. I love reading papers - it’s like going on a Wikipedia rabbit hole, but with much more detailed information. I’m not an academic or researcher myself.<p>The common advice is to read the abstract and then conclusion, and only the method if you want to dig deeper.<p>Try to find a well-cited “meta analysis” or “literature review” in the field you’re looking into. These will common on the current state of the research field, and reference influential papers. They’re a great starting point.<p>I find myself needing to do something analogous to “suspending disbelief” when reading about a new topic. There is usually a lot of terminology I don’t understand, but I put up with it for a while. Eventually it makes sense. Other times, I need to look up the actual definitions.
For computer science, the morning paper has interesting discussions on cs related papers: <a href="https://blog.acolyer.org/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.acolyer.org/</a>
Google Scholar is good for finding papers on topics you want to search for.<p>Following Twitter is good for discovering things you didn't know to search for.<p>I also think magazines are good to get for general reading, for example: IEEE Spectrum, Scientific American, Nature, Physics Today, etc.