My strategy typically is using https://scholar.google.com/ to search for interesting papers

Copy the link, or the DOI and drop it into SciHub and you will have a complete copy of the paper.

SciHub will always be a better resource for learning science than any science journalism from the Guardian or wherever. And if you find an interesting paper, and don’t understand it, or have questions, or want to know what kind of paper it is, or if it has merit: share it and we can discuss it.

Using this strategy after Uni I was able to re-learn all the new physics and chemistry discoveries that happened after I lost access to my school’s papers.

At Uni I spent most of my time reading scientific papers and in the library reading esoteric books; but even then you got access to a fraction of the papers since your school only gets subscriptions to a limited number of places.

Her project was so successful she had to go on the run; not sure if she still is.

Even at universities like Berlin’s Frei Universtat they tell their students to use SciHub because you get more access to what is literally everyone’s inheritance of scientific knowledge

Another character in this story is Aaron Swartz creator of RSS, and Markdown (Used in this software)

He is essentially a martyr because he was caught copying every paper from JSTOR, which actually isn’t even papers that are copyright protected its just a service that holds papers. But the FBI wanted to make an example of him and facing decades in prison and being a computer expert, he would be labeled and hacker and get solitary, which is literally torture (even according to the UN).

So he took his own life before he went to jail and we lost a kind soul, and a truly great mind. And he had only just begun his contributions to the open source community and made tools we all still use today.

RSS? If you listen to podcasts you are using a tool he created.

So don’t let these people who risked their lives, or lost them, to get you access to all this scientific knowledge that rightfully belongs to everyone; and not use the tools that are available to you. Scientific papers will teach you so much more about the world than news.google or any other random tech site.

Look up articles on Phosphorus and learn about how the European who discovered it collected pee from everyone he knew like the weirdest guy ever but then discovered something that significantly changed the world. Or find out about femto-second lasers, because femto-second clocks are cheap and you can build one!