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. Tech

    Mind over machine

    People control a computer through electrodes implanted in their brains.

  2. 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.

  3. Book Review: Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, with Sandra Blakeslee

    Review by Laura Sanders.

  4. Math

    Marathoning made easy

    Or at least endurable, by calculating and then keeping to a physiologically sustainable pace.

  5. Life

    Gene therapy for depression

    Researchers were able to reduce pathological behaviors in mice by delivering genetic material to a particular brain region.

  6. Health & Medicine

    How being deaf can enhance sight

    Hearing-specialized brain regions can adapt to processing visual input, cat experiments show.

  7. Sleep Gone Awry

    Researchers inch closer to causes, cures for insomnia, narcolepsy.

  8. Science & Society

    2010 Nobels recognize potential of basic science to shape the world

    Prizes go to IVF, graphene and ‘carbon chemistry at its best’

  9. Physics

    Physics Nobel goes to graphene

    Discovered only six years ago, the 2-D carbon sheets have spun off a new field of research.

  10. Space

    Distant world could support life

    For the first time, astronomers detect a planet beyond the solar system with the potential to be habitable.

  11. Life

    A salty tail

    Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.

  12. Tech

    A compass that lights the way

    Researchers develop a highly sensitive optical instrument for measuring magnetic fields.