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.
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All Stories by Laura Sanders
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Neuroscience
Signs of Huntington’s show up in the brain in childhood
Hints of Huntington’s disease show up in the brain long before symptoms do.
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Neuroscience
Adolescent brains open to change
Adolescent brains are still changing, a malleability that renders them particularly sensitive to the outside world.
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Health & Medicine
Why kids look funny when they run
Kids’ short legs give them little time to push high off the ground, a constraint that leads to the jerky toddler trot.
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Science & Society
Neurological condition probably caused medieval scribe’s shaky handwriting
By scrutinizing a medieval scribe’s wiggly handwriting, scientists conclude that the writer suffered from essential tremor.
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Health & Medicine
Nobel medicine prize won for drugs from natural sources
Nobel Prizes in medicine or physiology awarded for drugs that combat roundworms and malaria
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Neuroscience
Kavli Foundation gives more money for the brain
The Kavli Foundation will provide $100 million toward solving the mysteries of the brain.
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Neuroscience
Separate cell types encode memory’s time, place
Cells called ocean cells help store a memory’s “where,” while other cells called island cells help store a memory’s “when.”
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Health & Medicine
For kids learning new words, it’s all about context
By recording the first three years of life, researchers get hints about a child’s language development.
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Health & Medicine
Backwash from nursing babies may trigger infection fighters
A nursing baby’s saliva may get slurped back into mom’s breast, where it stimulates an immune response.
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Neuroscience
Misfolded proteins implicated in more brain diseases
Alzheimer’s, other disorders show similarity to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other prion infections.