A Mixed Bag for Private Spaceflight, a New Spider Species and the Health Risks of Alcohol
We discuss a big week for commercial spaceflight, a red dye ban and a scary spider species in this news roundup.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week by catching up on some science news you might have missed.
Last Tuesday a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services committee released a new draft report on alcohol. The review of existing data tied just one drink a day to increased risk of liver cirrhosis, oral cancer and esophageal cancer. The committee also found that alcohol use was associated with a higher risk of death from seven types of cancer. And this isn’t the first time that the health effects of alcohol have made headlines in 2025: earlier this month Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argued that alcoholic drinks should come with cancer warning labels.
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The report did find some counterintuitive connections, too: people who had one drink a day had a lower risk of ischemic stroke than people who didn’t, and women who consumed one, two or three drinks per day had a lower risk of diabetes. But these apparent benefits are fickle. The lower risk of ischemic stroke, for example, can disappear if people even occasionally drink four or five servings in one sitting. And women who consumed two alcoholic drinks per day may have had a lower risk overall of diabetes, but they also had significantly higher risks of ischemic stroke and liver disease.
So the details might seem kind of confusing, but the takeaway is simple enough: you definitely shouldn’t take up drinking as a way to improve your health or use supposed benefits you’ve read about to justify your intake. The World Health Organization’s stance is that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for your health. Of course, we all do plenty of things that aren’t, strictly speaking, good for us. But judging by this new report, we should try to be mindful of how alcohol fits into the big picture of our lifestyles. There will no doubt be headlines in the future saying that, for example, red wine is good for x, y or z, but those headlines really never mean you should drink more alcohol than you’re currently drinking.
Meanwhile, last Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in food, beverages and ingested drugs. The dye, which is made from petroleum, was rejected for use in cosmetics and topical drugs back in 1990 after lab testing on rodents showed it could have carcinogenic effects in high doses. Food manufacturers will have until January 2027 to reformulate their products without Red Dye No. 3, and companies that make ingested drugs will have until January 2028.
Advocacy groups filed a petition for the FDA to ban Red Dye No. 3 in 2022, and the agency has concluded that the dye does violate something called the Delaney Clause—a part of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that keeps the FDA from authorizing any additive shown to cause cancer in humans or other animals. But we should note that, according to reporting from Stat News, the mechanism by which the dye causes cancer in male rats isn’t actually applicable to humans.
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Feltman: In other public health news, a team of more than 50 experts publishing in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal argued last week that the current diagnosis of “obesity” is flawed. The use of body mass index, or BMI, as a determinant of health has been on the chopping block for a while now, and these researchers propose focusing on more precise measurements of excess body fat. They’re also suggesting that people who meet the definition for obesity but who do not have any of the conditions that can sometimes be associated with higher weight, like diabetes or heart disease, be put in a separate category from folks who are already dealing with those health problems. The researchers say this will help physicians provide more nuanced care, though it’s not really clear how this would address the existing issue of weight stigma in medicine. If you want to learn more about how size bias impacts health care, check out our November 8 episode on the subject.
And now for some space. Last Wednesday a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched with two new lunar landers in tow. The two landers were created by two different private companies and were released into slightly different orbits.
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Feltman: One of the SUV-sized landers is from the Japanese startup ispace. The other comes from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace. Dubbed the Blue Ghost lunar lander, it’s carrying payloads for 10 different NASA experiments. Blue Ghost is expected to reach the lunar surface in about 45 days.
That wasn’t last week’s only commercial space win. On Thursday morning Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launched for the very first time. The rocket’s upper stage made it into orbit, which made the launch technically a success. But Blue Origin didn’t quite manage the extra credit portion of their exam: they tried and failed to land the rocket’s reusable booster on a ship waiting in the Atlantic. But given that New Glenn was originally supposed to take off back in 2020, this SpaceX competitor is probably happy to take the win.
Circling back to SpaceX, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for them last week, either. On Thursday afternoon the company ran the seventh test launch of its Starship vehicle. The second stage of the megarocket, which was carrying a test payload of mock satellites, exploded a few minutes after takeoff. According to a social media post by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, some kind of leak was likely the culprit, and the company plans to go ahead with another launch next month.
We’ll wrap up with something pretty wild. Have you ever thought about spiders in Australia and been like, “Nah, that’s not big or venomous enough for me”? Well, scientists have got you covered.
Last Monday researchers announced the discovery of a new species of funnel-web spider. It’s a close relative of the Sydney funnel-web spider, which is known for painful bites that can cause serious illness and even death. This new species, which scientists have nicknamed “Big Boy,” can grow—you guessed it—almost twice as long as other funnel-web spiders and it also has bigger fangs and venom glands. So have fun with that, Australia!
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Feltman: That’s all for this week’s news roundup. We’ll be back with another episode on Wednesday.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
