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. Physics

    As the icicle turns

    Drip by drip, a new machine freezes out an existing theory.

  2. Chemistry

    Superconductors go fractal

    Oxygen atoms arrange themselves in a self-similar pattern to help conduct electricity without resistance.

  3. Humans

    Whiffs of stiffs

    Forensic scientists develop a new way to find where the bodies are buried.

  4. Physics

    Blog: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle still certain

    Despite rumors to the contrary, a mainstay of quantum physics is just as (un)certain as ever.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Violent dreams may predict illness in advance

    A sleep disorder can precede neurodegenerative disease by decades.

  6. Psychology

    Sadness response strengthens with age

    Older people reacted more strongly to sad scenes than twentysomethings did in a recent study of emotional receptivity.

  7. Space

    Two is the magic number

    New experiments confirm a fundamental postulate of quantum mechanics.

  8. Space

    Taming time travel

    New work is solving paradoxes by making the impossible impossible.

  9. Life

    This won’t hurt a bit

    A new technology delivers vaccines through a Band-Aid–like patch.

  10. Chemistry

    Different strokes

    Though they share the same design, new micromachines are not a synchronized swimming team.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Proteins last longer in the brain

    A study in mice could lead to a better understanding of aging, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative processes.

  12. Physics

    Taming turbulence from afar

    New research shows that measurements of smooth fluid motion away from an object can be used to characterize the roiling flow right up next to it.