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. Health & Medicine

    Evidence is lacking that ‘cocooning’ prevents whooping cough in newborns

    In general, vaccinating adults who come into close contact with newborns is a good idea, but the practice on its own may not keep whooping cough away.

  2. Neuroscience

    Brain gains seen in elderly mice injected with human umbilical cord plasma

    Plasma from human umbilical cord blood refreshes aspects of learning and memory in mice.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Vaccinating pregnant women protects newborns from whooping cough

    Pregnant women who receive the pertussis, or whooping cough, vaccine pass on to their new-borns immunity to the potentially deadly bacterial infection.

  4. Humans

    Scientists seek early signs of autism

    The search for autism biomarkers, in the blood and the brain, is heating up.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Language heard, but never spoken, by young babies bestows a hidden benefit

    Adults who as babies heard but never spoke Korean benefited from their latent language knowledge decades later, a new study finds.

  6. Environment

    When coal replaces a cleaner energy source, health is on the line

    Health concerns prompted a shift from nuclear power to coal. But that shift came with its own health troubles, a new study suggests.

  7. Health & Medicine

    For kids, daily juice probably won’t pack on the pounds

    An analysis of existing studies suggests that regular juice drinking isn’t linked to much weight gain in kids.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Don’t put greasy Q-tips up your kid’s nose, and other nosebleed advice

    Nosebleeds in children are common and usually nothing to fret about.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Touches early in life may make a big impact on newborn babies’ brains

    The type and amount of touches a newborn baby gets in the first days of life may shape later responses to touch perception, a study suggests.

  10. Neuroscience

    Smartphones may be changing the way we think

    We rely on our digital devices to connect with others and for memory and navigation shortcuts. What is that doing to our brains?

  11. Health & Medicine

    See how bacterial blood infections in young kids plummeted after vaccines

    Rates of pneumococcal bacteremia in children plummeted by 95 percent after the introduction of vaccines against Streptococcus bacteria.

  12. Neuroscience

    Brain training turns recall rookies into memory masters

    Six weeks of training turned average people into memory masters, a skill reflected in their brains.