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

    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.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Caffeine resets body’s clock

    Caffeine can push the body’s clock back.

  3. 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.

  4. Neuroscience

    Misfolded proteins implicated in more brain diseases

    Alzheimer’s, other disorders show similarity to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other prion infections.

  5. Neuroscience

    Altered protein makes mice smarter

    By tweaking a single gene, scientists have turned average mice into supersmart daredevils.

  6. Neuroscience

    Whistled language uses both sides of the brain

    Unlike spoken words, language made of whistles processed by both sides of the brain.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Study finds early signs of bookishness in a child’s brain

    Children from book-friendly homes show higher brain activity when they hear a story, but there’s more to learn about how reading affects growing brains.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Football games come with more head hits than practices do

    As football intensifies from practice to games, the number of impacts increases, a new study finds.

  9. Neuroscience

    Hints of how the brain “sees” dreams emerge

    Nerve cells that make sense of visual input keep chugging away during REM sleep, suggesting that these cells may help a sleeper “see” dreams.

  10. Neuroscience

    Hints of how the brain “sees” dreams emerge

    Nerve cells that make sense of visual input keep chugging away during REM sleep, suggesting that these cells may help a sleeper “see” dreams.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Fish oil may counter schizophrenia

    Three months of omega-3 fatty acids protects against psychosis for years, a small study suggests.

  12. Neuroscience

    Brain scans hint at reasons for stress-eating

    Moderate stress changes brain behavior in ways that may lead to poor food choices.