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

    Avian airlines: Alaska to New Zealand nonstop

    Tracked bar-tailed godwits break previous nonstop flight record for birds.

  2. Space

    More problems with Hubble

    Hubble’s resurrection is suspended while engineers examine two anomalies.

  3. Earth

    Primordial soup lives again

    Fifty-five years later, new analyses of leftovers from Stanley Miller's famous 'primordial soup' experiment suggest that life could have originated near volcanoes.

  4. Space

    Hubble, heal thyself

    NASA scientists are cleared to remotely switch equipment on the Hubble Space Telescope in the hopes of restoring the orbiting observatory’s function by October 16.

  5. Paleontology

    New arthropod species really stuck together

    Recent fossil discovery shows that new species of arthropod formed chains, raising the possibility of communal behavior.

  6. Life

    A better understanding of inherited breast cancer

    New studies on a type of inherited breast cancer identify a key factor with different roles in different cancers.

  7. Planetary Science

    New angles on Mercury

    The NASA MESSENGER spacecraft completed its second flyby of Mercury, yielding crisp new images of a large swath of the planet not seen before.

  8. Life

    Honeybees play follow-the-leaders

    Avert your eyes, Margaret, it's a streaker bee! High definition cameras have caught streaker honeybees flying fast above the swarm, leading the crowd to a new home.

  9. Paleontology

    Forget bird-brained

    Scientists have uncovered a new dinosaur that breathed like a bird.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Closing in on Rett syndrome

    Scientists find that a particular part of the mouse brain is responsible for behavioral abnormalities associated with Rett syndrome, an autism spectrum disease that strikes females.