![Laura Sanders](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/l_Sanders.jpg?resize=214%2C214&ssl=1)
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
- Health & Medicine
Cocaine trumps food for female rats
A study in rats finds that males prefer food over cocaine while females prefer the drug, a step toward better understanding of sex differences in addiction.
- Health & Medicine
A new way for blind mice to see
A new type of prosthetic eye can analyze patterns of cell activity to reproduce images similar to those produced in normal vision.
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Quantum weirdness
Here are some key concepts in quantum mechanics experiments — and how those concepts play out in the real world.
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- Physics
Entanglement loophole closed
A long-distance experiment rejects a challenge to quantum physics.
- Health & Medicine
The fingers don’t lie
The brain has at least two copy editors, typing experiments show.
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- Tech
Robots can use coffee as a picker-upper
A gripper made of a bag of loose grains has advantages over grasping devices that use individual digits.
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- Math
Marathoning made easy
Or at least endurable, by calculating and then keeping to a physiologically sustainable pace.
- Life
Gene therapy for depression
Researchers were able to reduce pathological behaviors in mice by delivering genetic material to a particular brain region.
- Health & Medicine
How being deaf can enhance sight
Hearing-specialized brain regions can adapt to processing visual input, cat experiments show.