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. Psychology

    Sadness response strengthens with age

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

  2. Space

    Two is the magic number

    New experiments confirm a fundamental postulate of quantum mechanics.

  3. Space

    Taming time travel

    New work is solving paradoxes by making the impossible impossible.

  4. Life

    This won’t hurt a bit

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

  5. Chemistry

    Different strokes

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Psychology

    Voter madness

    Sports outcomes can influence politicians’ performance at the polls.

  9. Safety in Numbers

    Mathematics offers innovative weapons for fighting terrorism.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Stem cells from blood a ‘huge’ milestone

    New technique promises to be easier, cheaper and faster than other harvesting methods.

  11. Space

    Making lemonade with quantum lemons

    Physicists produce “spooky action at a distance,” using a phenomenon that would usually disrupt it.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Snakes on the brain

    In a bizarre experiment, researchers delve into the neural roots of courage.