New in Brief: Body & Brain

Two-drug therapy for lung cancer
Patients age 70 or older with lung cancer should get two drugs rather than the currently recommended single-drug therapy, scientists in France report online August 9 in the Lancet. The researchers randomly assigned 448 lung cancer patients, median age 77, to get either two standard chemotherapies or one. The double-treatment group had a median survival time of 10.3 months, and 45 percent lived longer than one year. The single-drug group survived a median of 6.2 months and only 25 percent survived a year. Despite observing more side effects in the double-therapy patients, the researchers argue that the longer survival times suggest that current treatment guidelines be reconsidered. —Nathan Seppa

A boyish side to soy
Girls who drank infant formula made from soy played more like boys at age three and a half, a new study finds. The findings were modest and diminished with age. As such, the authors argue, such observations “encourage cautious interpretation of our findings, but do not invalidate them.” University and federal scientists from North Carolina compared infant feeding data and surveys of play behavior for more than 7,000 children who had been born around Avon, England, in the early 1990s. The findings, reported online August 3 in Environmental Health Perspectives, also linked breastfeeding with a slight feminization in boys’ play. —Janet Raloff

Mosquitoes’ moonlit bites
A major malaria-carrying mosquito, Anopheles funestus, prefers to bite on moonlit nights, a new study finds. On 35 consecutive nights, researchers in Mozambique trapped mosquitoes — predominantly A. funestus — and compared capture rates and bug behavior. The researchers found mosquito activity rose with moonlight intensity, both indoors and out; this was especially true during the early part of the night with a waxing moon, the researchers report in the September 2011 Medical and Veterinary Entomology. Moonlight increased neither swarming nor mating efficiency by males, but it did prompt females to return for additional feeding without any delay. The authors suggest covering up when the moon is bright. —Janet Raloff