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.
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 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 :)).