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. Math

    Slime mold is master network engineer

    Single-cell organism develops food distribution system that is as efficient as the Tokyo rail system; inspires new math model for designing dynamic systems.

  2. Physics

    Liquid light bender proposed

    Tiny nanoparticles dispersed in fluid may hide objects.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Darker liquor, never sicker

    People report feeling worse the next morning after drinking bourbon than after drinking vodka.

  4. Physics

    Frozen light stays fresh longer

    Researchers have trapped light in an ultracold cloud of atoms for 1.5 seconds.

  5. Life

    Giant panda genome unveiled

    DNA clues suggest little inbreeding, surprise on the bamboo diet.

  6. Life

    Fruit flies can be alcoholics too

    Drinking behavior of Drosophila shows similarities to human addiction.

  7. Life

    Bacteria seen swimming the electron shuffle

    Researchers have captured the bacterium Shewanella’s behavior on film, and the microbes didn’t behave as expected

  8. Physics

    Chink found in armor of perfect cloak

    A theoretical perfect cloaking device could be foiled using charged particles, a new study suggests.

  9. Trawling the brain

    New findings raise questions about reliability of fMRI as gauge of neural activity.

  10. Chemistry

    Elusive triangular snowflakes explained

    Dust particles,wind and aerodynamics could steer some snowflakes toward a three-sided fate

  11. Physics

    How to mix oil and water

    Bouncing an oil-coated water droplet creates a tiny emulsion and reveals physics of mixing.

  12. Computing

    First programmable quantum computer created

    System uses ultracold beryllium ions to tackle 160 randomly chosen programs.