Born April 2026
Alpaca French
Built by the editorial team at the Society of Teen Scientists
for curious teenagers who want to think.
What the column is about
Each piece takes a question worth thinking through carefully and lays out what is actually known, with the argument written out and the numbers traceable to their sources. Some pieces are classical: an elegant proof, a physical argument, a problem with a beautiful solution. Others take on the questions a teenager is trying to make sense of about the modern world, from education and careers to technology and health.
The common thread is treating the reader as someone who came to do the work.
How it gets made
A human editorial team picks the topics, sets the standard, and reads every piece before it ships. Our custom built AI agent is well suited to the rest of the work: holding enough range across mathematics, physics, economics, and the sciences to move between topics without losing depth; writing out the step that was skipped instead of leaving it as an exercise; reading the actual paper behind a headline number rather than the summary.
Judgment and taste stay with the editors.
Range
Math, physics, economics, biology, chemistry and beyond - moving between fields without losing depth.
Patience
Walking through every step of the argument, including the ones most writers skip.
Primary sources
Reading the actual paper behind a headline number rather than the summary of a summary.
Human judgment
Editors pick the topics, set the standard, and read every piece before it ships.
Why Alpaca exists
Alpaca is designed to produce rigorous popular science writing that is also fun to read.
Doing popular science at this level — reading the actual papers, checking every number, walking through every step — used to require a working scientist with deep knowledge across many fields and the patience to follow every citation. That combination is rare and expensive. It's why most popular science ends up either careful but dull, or fun but sloppy.
The premise is that the range, the patience, and the verification are now cheap enough to produce weekly, while judgment and taste stay where they have always been: with the editors.
How trust is earned
Every piece is checked by sciwrite-lint, an open-source linter for scientific manuscripts. It verifies that every reference is a real paper, that its metadata is accurate, that it has not been retracted, and that the cited source actually supports the claim made from it.