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

    Tiny living machines called xenobots can create copies of themselves

    When clusters of frog cells known as xenobots form a Pac-Man shape, they are especially efficient at replicating in a new way, researchers say.

  2. Can psychedelics meet their potential for treating mental health disorders?

    Psychedelics hold lots of promise as treatments for mental health disorders like PTSD and depression. But the drugs still face hurdles.

  3. Neuroscience

    Brainless sponges contain early echoes of a nervous system

    Simple sponges contain cells that appear to send signals to digestive chambers, a communication system that offer hints about how brains evolved.

  4. Health & Medicine

    A custom brain implant lifted a woman’s severe depression

    An experimental device interrupts brain activity linked to a woman’s low mood. The technology, she said, has changed her lens on life.

  5. Health & Medicine

    How personalized brain organoids could help us demystify disorders

    Personalized clusters of brain cells made from people with Rett syndrome had abnormal activity, showing potential for studying how human brains go awry.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Ripples in rats’ brains tied to memory may also reduce sugar levels

    Brain signals called sharp-wave ripples have an unexpected job: influencing the body’s sugar levels, a study in rats suggests.

  7. Health & Medicine

    What kids lost when COVID-19 upended school

    Researchers are starting to tally how a year and a half of pandemic has left many children struggling academically and emotionally.

  8. Health & Medicine

    How Hans Berger’s quest for telepathy spurred modern brain science

    In the 1920s, psychiatrist Hans Berger invented EEG and discovered brain waves — though not long-range signals.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Controlling nerve cells with light opened new ways to study the brain

    A method called optogenetics offers insights into memory, perception and addiction.

  10. Neuroscience

    A deep look at a speck of human brain reveals never-before-seen quirks

    Three-dimensional views of 50,000 cells from a woman’s brain yield one of the most detailed maps yet.

  11. Health & Medicine

    FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug despite controversy over whether it works

    A new Alzheimer's treatment slows progression of the disease, the drug’s developers say. But some researchers question its effectiveness.

  12. Health & Medicine

    MDMA, the key ingredient in Ecstasy, eases symptoms of severe PTSD

    By the end of the trial, 67 percent of the participants who took MDMA had improved so much that they no longer qualified as having a PTSD diagnosis.