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. Life

    Cells renew in the human heart

    Carbon 14 from Cold War–era nuclear bomb tests allowed researchers to track cell birth.

  2. Physics

    Spin control for technology

    Long-lived helix offers a new way to keep electron spin stable and in sync

  3. Life

    Louse-y genome surprise

    Blood-sucking body lice have an odd arrangement of mitochondrial genes.

  4. Health & Medicine

    How herpes re-rears its ugly head

    Researchers identify a key player in the reactivation of herpes simplex virus type 1.

  5. Physics

    Never mind the Pollock ‘fractals’

    Scientists strengthen claim that fractal analysis is moot.

  6. Physics

    Evidence mounts for an exotic supersolid

    Rubidium atoms simultaneously act like a solid and a superfluid.

  7. Life

    Live Wires

    Cells reach out and touch each other with tunneling nanotubes.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Reading the patterns of spatial memories

    Researchers can tell where participants are standing in a virtual world by “seeing” memories of the journey.

  9. Earth

    Buckyballs do antimicrobial magic

    A new study shows that soccer-ball–shaped carbon nanoparticles can prevent biofilm from gunking up water filters.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Chemotherapy drug may in fact strengthen some cancer cells

    Research shows a standard drug for treating brain cancer can actually make some cells more aggressive.

  11. Health & Medicine

    One protein mediates damage from high-fructose diet

    A study in mice suggests that a liver protein mediates the harmful effects of consuming too much fructose, an increasingly common aspect of Western diets.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Out-of-sync days throw heart and metabolism out of whack

    When people sleep may be just as important as how much they sleep. Altered sleep patterns can lead to heart disease and diabetes, a new study suggests.