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. Science & Society

    2010 Nobels recognize potential of basic science to shape the world

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

  2. Physics

    Physics Nobel goes to graphene

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

  3. Space

    Distant world could support life

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

  4. 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.

  5. Tech

    A compass that lights the way

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

  6. Health & Medicine

    Defining normal in the brain

    A new growth curve paves way for scans to be used to spot early signs of autism, schizophrenia or other disorders.

  7. Life

    Microbe’s survival manual

    Researchers have uncovered how D. radiodurans can withstand extreme radiation.

  8. Physics

    String theory entangled

    Scientists forge an intriguing mathematical link between black holes and the physics of the very small.

  9. Neuroanatomy down on the farm

    Researchers retreat to bucolic surroundings for brain cell-mapping competition.

  10. Physics

    Very tiny, very cool

    Physicists outline a scheme to build a ‘refrigerator’ that can cool to near absolute zero and is based on only a few particles.

  11. Chemistry

    How to bug bugs

    New insights on how insect repellents work could eventually help scientists prevent the transmission of diseases like malaria.

  12. Earth

    Tsunami triggered by one-two punch

    Geologists report the first recorded observation of an unusual earthquake sequence.