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. Health & Medicine

    Fine-scale structure of egg crucial for fertility

    Scientists describe the shape of a protein required for conception. These new molecular details will lead to an improved understanding of how sperm and egg unite.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Bone density may be determined in the gut

    A surprising new connection between the gut and bones may lead to new forms of treatment for human bone diseases such as osteoporosis.

  3. Animals

    Lizard push-ups grab attention

    Nearby lizards more likely to get the message if its preceded by push-ups

  4. Humans

    Moonsleeping bad for spacewalking

    Day three of the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting offered news about Down syndrome and sleep cycles.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Still crazy (in love) after all these years

    A brain imaging study reveals that some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage.

  6. Life

    Schools make fish smarter

    A study of consensus decision making shows that sticklebacks make wider choices in groups of three or more.

  7. Space

    NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander stops communicating

    NASA deems the mission a full success.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Itch

    When it comes to sensory information detected by the body, pain is king, and itch is the court jester. But that insistent, tingly feeling—satisfied only by a scratch—is anything but funny to the millions of people who suffer from it chronically.

  9. Chemistry

    First complete cancer genome sequenced

    With the entire genome sequence of a tumor now in hand, scientists may be able to start answering basic questions about cancer.

  10. Space

    MESSENGER glimpses Mercury’s Western hemisphere, new features

    The results are in from MESSENGER’s second flyby of Mercury, one of the least-explored planets in the solar system.

  11. Space

    Hubble back in action (for now)

    A main camera of the Hubble Space Telescope is back online.

  12. Space

    Try, try again

    NASA announced October 23 that, despite a series of setbacks, the prognosis is good for reviving the Hubble Space Telescope.