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

    Out-of-sync body clock causes more woes than sleepiness

    The ailment, called circadian-time sickness, can be described with Bayesian math, scientists propose.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Baby-led weaning is safe, if done right

    Babies who fed themselves solid foods, called baby-led weaning, were no more likely to choke than spoon-fed babies, a new study finds.

  3. Animals

    Hot and spicy pain signals get blocked in naked mole-rats

    Naked mole-rats have a protein that interrupts pain signal.

  4. Animals

    Hot and spicy pain signals get blocked in naked mole-rats

    Naked mole-rats have a protein that interrupts pain signal.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Don’t cocoon a kid who has a concussion

    Parents should fight the urge to limit kids’ activities after a concussion.

  6. Health & Medicine

    It’s time to retire the five-second rule

    Wet food can slurp bacteria off the floor in less than a second.

  7. Neuroscience

    Jeremy Freeman seeks to simplify complex brain science

    As a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus, Jeremy Freeman is equal parts neuroscientist, computer coder and data visualization whiz.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Activity trackers fall short in weight-loss trial

    In a two-year study, wearable activity monitors didn’t help young adults lose more weight.

  9. Neuroscience

    Brain’s physical structure may help guide its wiring

    The brain’s stiffness helps dictate how nerve cells grow, a study suggests.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Maybe you don’t need to burp your baby

    Everybody does it. But burping babies after a meal may not cut down on crying or spit-ups, a study suggests.

  11. Neuroscience

    Brain training can alter opinions of faces

    Covert neural training could shift people’s opinions of faces.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Doctors need better ways to figure out fevers in newborns

    When a very young baby gets a fever, doctors scramble to figure out the cause. A new type of test may ultimately help identify whether the culprit is bacterial or viral.