Unless you’re working on something that has the potential to be directly influenced by a paper, I’ve found trying to stumble through academic papers to be a huge waste of time. Remember that academic papers are by and large written for other academics, not for general purpose or even specialized engineers (obviously it depends how specialized you are). Take something like merge sort - I’d recommend the Khan academy video before recommending the academic paper if you want to understand how it works. I get that you should understand “why” it works from an academic perspective, but I don’t know that you really get much value from that level of understanding.
This is generally true, but some original papers are beautiful and elegant, and give you amazing insight even with little domain knowledge. Some of my favorites in biology include Shinya Yamanakas original iPS paper (1), Sydney Brenners paper on C. elegans (2). I also like the original BLaST paper.
Anyone with the money and general scientific interest should consider subscribing to Nature or Science. It’s a fun browse every week and you never know what fields interesting finding might fancy you until you look at the articles.
Couldn’t give a shit if someone pirates or pays the publisher, I like to have a book in my hand in the loo and browsing through a magazine is in some ways much better to take all of the science in fast that I’ve never managed to replicate in a computer. Except with google reader but let’s not open that wound now shall we?
Reading the news on both nature and science websites could be fun. And it's kind of more accurate than those reported by news agencies and often lack the hyperbole from those nonsense PR
