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

    Brain’s hidden sewers revealed

    Specialized cells host a hitherto unknown cleansing system.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Monkey brains sensitive to others’ flubs

    Some of the brain’s nerve cells are programmed to light up only upon witnessing another’s error.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Alzheimer’s protein could help in MS

    A-beta, the same molecule that has been tied to dementia when it accumulates in the brain, appears to reduce damage when introduced to the bodies of mice with symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

  4. Neuroscience

    fMRI’s birthday lesson: Don’t ignore weird things you don’t understand

  5. Health & Medicine

    News Briefs: Body & Brain

    How deaf people process other senses, a gene variant that protects against Alzheimer's, and special cells that wrap and feed neural extensions

  6. Health & Medicine

    The Brain Set Free

    Lifting neural constraints could turn back time, making way for youthful flexibility.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Ecstasy may cause memory problems

    New users of club drug do worse than nonusers on one recall test.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Memories clutter brain in amnesia

    Complex patterns slow down object recognition in patients with disorder.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Some brains may be primed for pain

    When people keep hurting long after an injury heals, a process similar to addiction may be at work.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Body and Brain

    Good touch, bad touch A leg caress can delight or feel totally skeevy, depending on who’s doing the caressing. A touch’s emotional baggage can be seen in the brain’s initial response to that touch, scientists report in the June 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Heterosexual men’s somatosensory cortices, brain regions that detect […]

  11. Health & Medicine

    Learn to play piano in your sleep

    That’s still impossible, but an experiment suggests hearing a previously learned ditty while snoozing improves later performance of the piece.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Like a prion, Alzheimer’s protein seeds itself in the brain

    Injecting amyloid-beta into mice may induce misfolding of native amyloid-beta molecules, leading to the buildup associated with the neuron-killing disease.