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.
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