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I'm a total layman, but sometimes I have really random specific questions, like What does science say about the transfer of learning, or what is the distribution of different of sexual fetishes in the population, or what do we know about how English warbow training evolved, etc.

Honestly, I'm a total noob, sometimes I find interesting things in google scholar by using it kinda like google but usually, I don't. If I'm very lucky a science journalist has written something on it, but often they don't and even when they do they can totally mislead, especially the popular ones.

Good question! If you are a total laymen popular scientific magazines like the scientific american from nature publishing group are a good source. Articles therein are mostly written by current or former academics and scientists with educational background in a scientific branch and contact to universities and researchers. And they skim the most important articles in the primary literature or visit conferences in their branch.

From there you could dive deeper into the scientific literature over google scholar by searching and reading review articles that summarize the longer or recent past of a distinct scientific field. In the best case such review articles are written by several authors. In scientific fields like for example dark matter physics you will not be able as a laymen to get a picture how much percent roughly believe in the current paradigma or an alternative theory. Searching on google scholar with intitle:"name of theory/paradigma" might give you some hint how much researchers work/favor alternative theories.

(Hand) Books written by several leading scientists in a field are in general a reliable source, though often not covering most recent developments in a distinct field.

Concerning life sciences, published meta studies that analysed and evaluated the data of many published smaller former studies that refer to a distinct scientific question like for example "dying of bees" are a good first source.

If this all doesn't help you, skeptics.stackexchange is a very good site to ask which theory/cause is currently favored by the majority of the scientists or what the data favors. But like scholarpedia and wikipedia you cannot be sure the answers or articles are written by scientists with educational background in the related field. But as laymen I think it rather important to know does the majority agree, are there ongoing discussions and is the scientific community in a field split up, what is the current paradigma and how much research is ongoing on alternative theories and open questions. Popular scientific magazines normally cover these questions. If you are interested in more details, asking on a related scientific site on stackexchange is another option to get often a discussion/answer by several scientists or students in a field.

Depending on your level of interest into the field/problem, there are review papers available. They do not bring a direct contribution, but rather aim to provide an overview about a specific problem and how it evolved.

Then, you can go and read papers on a subject. It is a bit hard to get the foot in the door in some cases, but with a bit of practice, you can learn to read quickly through the abstract, related work and conclusions to get the idea of the paper and what has been done. The references are also pointers to previous, usually simpler work.

Just a word of caution: sometimes science presented by journalists is usually simplified, and sometimes this changes the message. Statistical studies are usually very affected by this.

If you are wondering where to start searching, I sometimes found the Wikipedia reference list a good starting point. There is also arxiv, which shows some publications. Of course, there are also the journals and conferences where the latest research is published, but those tend to be under a paywall.