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

    Fruit flies flee from shadows

    Studying flies’ responses to an ominous shadow may lead to a deeper understanding of humans’ emotions.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Birth-weight boost tied to cleaner air during Beijing Olympics

    Babies whose eighth month of gestation fell during the 2008 Beijing Olympics were born slightly heavier than babies born a year earlier or later, a stark indication of the effects of pollution on development.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Children’s cells live on in mothers

    A baby's cells knit their way into a mother’s body.

  4. Neuroscience

    Brain’s grid cells could navigate a curvy world

    If we ever need to flee a dying Earth on curved space islands — as humanity was forced to do in 'Interstellar' — our brains will adapt with ease, a new mathematical analysis suggests.

  5. Neuroscience

    Stimulating nerve cells stretches time between thinking, doing

    A head zap can stretch the time between intention and action.

  6. Neuroscience

    Children with autism excel at motion detection test

    Children with autism outperform children without the disorder on a test that requires averaging the movements of lots of dots.

  7. Neuroscience

    Zipping to Mars could badly zap brain nerve cells

    Charged particles like the ones astronauts might encounter wallop the brain, mouse study suggests.

  8. Health & Medicine

    How baby cries bore into mom’s brain

    Mouse moms’ brains are sculpted by pups’ pleas for help, which make her into a better mother.

  9. Neuroscience

    Brain on display

    In her online videos, Nancy Kanwisher goes where few other neuroscientists go.

  10. Neuroscience

    Tinnitus causes widespread trouble

    People don’t just hear the phantom ringing of tinnitus in the part of the brain that processes sounds.

  11. Neuroscience

    Catching Zs may snag memories, too

    Flies genetically destined to be forgetful could boost their memory with sleep.

  12. Psychology

    Big ears don’t necessarily come with baggage

    In a small study, adults judged children and teens with big ears as intelligent and likable.