Laura Sanders

Laura Sanders

Senior Writer, Neuroscience

Laura Sanders reports on neuroscience for Science News. She wrote Growth Curve, a blog about the science of raising kids, from 2013 to 2019 and continues to write about child development and parenting from time to time. She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she studied the nerve cells that compel a fruit fly to perform a dazzling mating dance. Convinced that she was missing some exciting science somewhere, Laura turned her eye toward writing about brains in all shapes and forms. She holds undergraduate degrees in creative writing and biology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she was a National Merit Scholar. Growth Curve, her 2012 series on consciousness and her 2013 article on the dearth of psychiatric drugs have received awards recognizing editorial excellence.

All Stories by Laura Sanders

  1. Neuroscience

    Biological puzzles abound in an up-close look at a human brain

    Mirror-image nerve cells, tight bonds between neuron pairs and surprising axon swirls abound in a bit of gray matter smaller than a grain of rice.

  2. Neuroscience

    The heart plays a hidden role in our mental health

    Deciphering the messages that the heart sends to the brain could lead to new anxiety treatments and even unlock the secrets of consciousness.

  3. Neuroscience

    Rat cells grew in mice brains, and helped sniff out cookies

    When implanted into mouse embryos, stem cells from rats grew into forebrains and structures that handle smells.

  4. Neuroscience

    Tiny treadmills show how fruit flies walk

    A method to force fruit flies to move shows the insects’ stepping behavior and holds clues to other animals’ brains and movement.

  5. Neuroscience

    Dogs know words for their favorite toys

    The brain activity of dogs that were expecting one toy but were shown another suggests canines create mental concepts of everyday objects.

  6. Artificial Intelligence

    How do babies learn words? An AI experiment may hold clues

    Using relatively little data, audio and video taken from a baby’s perspective, an AI program learned the names of objects the baby encountered.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Under very rare conditions, Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted

    Alzheimer’s isn’t contagious. But contaminated growth hormone injections caused early-onset Alzheimer’s in some recipients, a new study suggests.

  8. Animals

    Reindeer can sleep while they chew

    Brain waves and behaviors suggest that reindeer can doze while chewing, a timesaving strategy for sleeping under tough conditions.

  9. Neuroscience

    Brain scans give clues to how teens handle pandemic stress

    A study that followed hundreds of teenagers during the COVID-19 pandemic may explain why some people succumb to stress while others are more resilient.

  10. Neuroscience

    In a Jedi-like feat, rats can move a digital object using just their brain

    In a new study, rats could imagine their way through a 3-D virtual world, hinting at how brains can think about places that they’re not physically in.

  11. Neuroscience

    What a look at more than 3,000 kinds of cells in the human brain tells us

    A wide-reaching look at the cells that build the brain, detailed in 21 studies, showcases the brain’s cellular diversity and clues about how it works.

  12. Health & Medicine

    How brain implants are treating depression

    This six-part series follows people whose lives have been changed by an experimental treatment called deep brain stimulation.