I live in Poland, so the grass is really more green on the other side (or at least it gets 3-4 times more water ;)). I also want to keep in touch with my friends and family and Berlin is within 2h car trip, so I could come back for a weekend once in a while.
I know German good enough to communicate (I make a lot of mistakes though). It's not the main factor holding me from moving there right away. The reason I'm planning to work as Java programmer in Poland is to earn some money. I will need it to rent a living place and survive first months before i find a job.
Karma means (unfortunately) something more than that to buddhists. The view you described is something smart people came up with to make it acceptable for themselves. Original buddhist karma is ultimate balance of good and evil in the universe.
Google driverless car is one thing that comes to my mind that sounds like sci-fi idea but actually got implemented. It's still fresh so it makes big impression (at least among my friends). Check out the ted talk
I always wanted to know more about genetics, but didn't have enough time to study it. Basic tutorial + good links + outline of current state-of-art would be interesting to me. I do understand that it's a bit off-topic for this forum however.
I suspect it's the same for scientists for controversial topics. But discussing controversial topics is not science. Coming up with a way to verify a claim is. In general personality must be correlated with opinion (or at least that's my intuition :)).