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
Smell wiring gets set early
Mess with a baby mouse’s olfaction for too long and neurons never recover.
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Health & Medicine
If your kid hates broccoli, try, try again
Repeated exposure to foods may be the antidote to picky eating.
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Neuroscience
Paralyzed mouse legs move with burst of light
Neural patch makes leg muscles twitch in paralyzed mice when blue light shines.
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Neuroscience
Brain’s growth, networks unveiled in new maps
Two large-scale efforts describe human and mouse brains in detail.
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Health & Medicine
Autism spike may reflect better diagnoses, and that’s a good thing
As doctors get better at spotting autism spectrum disorders, kids may get help earlier — and the numbers of diagnoses will increase.
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Neuroscience
Ten thousand neurons linked to behaviors in fly
By studying the wiggles of 37,780 fly larvae, scientists link specific neurons to 29 distinct behaviors.
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Health & Medicine
Diet fix eases Huntington’s symptoms in mice
Supplement improves health of rodents with mutation that causes neurodegeneration like that seen in Huntington’s disease.
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Neuroscience
Scans suggest how the mind solves ethical dilemmas
Brain scans suggest how the mind solves a moral dilemma.
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Health & Medicine
Telling kids lies may teach them to lie
In a new study, kids who were told a lie were more likely to later tell a fib themselves. The results should encourage parents not to lie to their kids.
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Health & Medicine
Sugar doesn’t make kids hyper, and other parenting myths
There’s no shortage of advice out there for parents, but some pearls of wisdom simply aren’t true.
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Neuroscience
Pianists learn better by playing
Pianists’ muscle memory helped them recognize incorrect notes.
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Neuroscience
Brain chemicals help worms live long and prosper
Serotonin and dopamine accompany long lives in C. elegans worms under caloric restriction.