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Back in August, scientists published a worrisome report about Ebola in West Africa: The virus was rapidly changing its genetic code as it spread through people. Ebola was mutating about twice as fast as it did in previous outbreaks, a team from Harvard University found.

The study spurred a bunch of concerns. Could the virus evolve into a more dangerous pathogen? Could it start spreading through the airborne route?

Virologists said neither scenarios were likely. Past outbreaks showed that pathogens don't easily change their mode of transmission. And sometimes they become less deadly as they adapt to people.

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But there was one legitimate concern: Diagnostic tests and experimental treatments could stop working if Ebola changed its genetic code too quickly.

Now scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have new data that alleviate these concerns.

Nine months into the epidemic, Ebola wasn't mutating any faster than in previous outbreaks, Heinz Feldmann and his colleagues report Thursday in the journal Science.

In fact, Ebola's genes remained relatively stable between June and November 2014, the team found, despite the extensive human-to-human transmission taking place during that time.

"Our data indicate that EBOV [Ebolavirus] is not undergoing rapid evolution in humans during the current outbreak," Feldmann and his colleagues write. At the same time, there's no evidence the virus has become more deadly.

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The team came to these conclusions after sequencing the genomes of four Ebola viruses taken from patients in Mali from October and November. They compared the genetic codes of these strains to those sequenced in June from Sierra Leone and from other outbreaks in the past. The strains weren't as different as previous studies predicted they should be.

"This is some good news for the development of interventions," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the NIAID but wasn't directly involved with the study. "The data also indicate it's quite unlikely the virus will mutate and change its way of transmission."

One study, of course, can't give the whole picture. To date, the world has recorded nearly 25,000 cases. The study analyzed only four genomes — just a tiny slice of the virus strains circulating in West Africa. Other versions of the virus may be evolving more rapidly.

And with viruses, Fauci says, you never know what will happen. "One should not be surprised that RNA viruses, like Ebola, mutate," he says. "They do that all the time. The questions are how much are they mutating and are there functional consequences of those mutations."

The few mutations observed in the Mali sequences don't look like they would effect Ebola tests, potential vaccines or treatments, Fauci says.

It's unclear why the current study disagrees with the previous one from Harvard University. One possibility is that the two teams used different computer models to estimate the mutation rate. When the NIAID team applied its model to the earlier data from Harvard, the team also came up with the lower mutation rate — the one that matches the rate observed in previous outbreaks in Central Africa.

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Global Health

The very first time we encounter Dong Nguyen, one of several hotly-debated characters in Tina Fey's The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, he's just introduced himself to Kimmy in their GED class. And as surely happens to Dong constantly since he immigrated to New York from Vietnam, she's stifling a giggle over his name.

"Nice to meet you, (chuckle) Dong (chuckle), I'm Kimmy," she spits out. But this time, Dong, played by Ki Hong Lee (The Maze Runner and a whole bunch of Wong Fu videos), has his own reason to snort. "In Vietnam, Kimmy means penis!" he says, leaving her stumbling for words.

It's a completely disarming scene. The irony that Dong is the one teasing Kimmy about her name floats completely over his head, which is partly what makes him such an endearing character: he unwittingly reclaims the gag. The joke is an equalizing force; depending on the context, both of their names can read as ridiculous.

But for a lot of viewers, including a lot of Asian-American ones, the traits that make Dong such a classic Fey-sian misfit also make him a dull, even infuriating Asian stereotype: his thickly accented, broken English; his gig delivering Chinese food by bike; his aptitude for math; his deportation-anxiety story line. So which is it: does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up?

So which is it: does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up?

Here too, it's all about context. In the bigger, bird's-eye view of Asian-Americans on-screen, the squickiness people feel over Dong is completely understandable, since the landscape was so desolate until so very recently. But within the universe of this show, Dong's foreignness completely makes sense, and it makes him a stronger character.

Unbreakable, after all, is all about foreignness. Everyone we come to care about is an outsider-misfit. Kimmy just spent the past 15 years in an underground bunker, trapped by an Ariel Castro-inspired doomsday cult, and is as new to the city as Dong. She's possibly the last person in New York still using the classified ads. She eats candy for dinner. Her struggling actor roommate finds he gets treated better in a werewolf costume than as a gay, black man. Her boss, a wealthy Native American woman, is purposely passing as white.

They're all delightfully awkward, and I think we're meant to like them more for the strangeness that binds them together. Their social ineptitudes are invitations to empathize, as the Atlantic's Megan Garber has put it.

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And when it comes to Dong and Kimmy — and their budding romance — I think we're meant to root for them to bond over their shared outsiderness, not in spite of it.

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But when I polled folks on Twitter about how they viewed Dong, some said they don't buy the "It's great satire!" or the "Hey, an Asian is a romantic leading man, be happy!" readings of this character.

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"Too early to tell," Ren Hsieh tweeted at me. "Asians have been mostly one-dimensional caricatures in TV/movies for so long, they don't know what to satire yet."

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Yang fleshes out a major source of the anxiety over Dong: the inescapable comparisons to Sixteen Candles' infamous Long Duk Dong, whose catch-phrases became the stuff of playground taunts for Asian-Americans growing up in the '80s. He's a foreign exchange student from some vaguely Asian country who exists solely to weird out the white suburbanites he's landed among. Everything about this Dong is portrayed as wrong, from his accent to his size to his choice in women, and viewers are never asked to see their world through his eyes.

But in Unbreakable, Dong is the one who's constantly thrown by Kimmy's antics. In one scene, she unwittingly makes a bunch of hand gestures that mean a parade of vulgarities in Vietnam. "What's wrong with you?" he asks, shaking his head. Dong is flipping the script, as Yang puts it, something his predecessor never got to do.

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The gesture Kimmy's making doesn't mean the same thing to Dong. Eric Liebowitz/Netflix hide caption

itoggle caption Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

The gesture Kimmy's making doesn't mean the same thing to Dong.

Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

And while we don't know what's next for Kimmy and Dong — the season ends on a romantic cliffhanger — we already know it'll look way different from Sixteen Candles's final scene, where Samantha shares a kiss with the studly all-American Jake Ryan. Kimmy's already told her Jake Ryan-esque suitor, a blonde trust-fund beau named Logan Beekman, to shove off when he reveals a few unsavory details, including that his British accent is fake. I get the feeling she dug the accent not for the reason Logan intended — it made him sound posh — but because it made him a little more of an outsider.

That's why I doubt viewers who have qualms with Dong would be satisfied if he'd been written as a sort of anti-stereotype, a Don Draper-esque smooth talker, perhaps, or a Jesse Pinkman-like hustler instead of the model minority type he's telegraphing. After all, in Unbreakable, as Yang puts it, the "non-WASP, nonstraight, nonmale characters, as mad and antic as they are, serve as the series' empathic anchors." In a show like this, would we root for a character like that?

If there were simply more Asian-American male characters on-screen, would Dong activate so many viewer's spidey senses?

On the other hand, if there were simply more Asian-American male characters on-screen, falling along a wider personality spectrum, would Dong — with his accent, his name, his job, and his math savviness — activate so many viewer's spidey senses? I happen to have a name people poke fun at, I'm pretty OK at math, and I used to work at a Chinese restaurant. The problem with Dong isn't that he's unrealistic. It's that we've seen the broad strokes of this character before, and in a landscape this limited, that grates, even if this show is doing something interesting with him.

"You're kind, you're funny, and both our names mean 'penis,' " Kimmy tells Dong when she admits she has a crush on him. The things that make him attractive to Kimmy, and a great character in this show, are the very things that make a lot of viewers wildly side-eye him. And that's totally understandable in a world where you can name the notable Asian-American men on-screen without running out of breath — and two of those characters are socially inept, hyper-foreign outsiders named Dong. In the context of the greater history of Asian-Americans on screen, any character named Dong is going to bring up a lot of complicated feels. Maybe in a perfect world, with plenty of sitcoms with Asian-American romantic leads, it'd be possible to read this character without the weight of everything that came before.

And at this point in the novel (which comes fairly early), you have to make a choice as a reader: Do you believe that Henry is suffering through an increasingly destructive mental illness? Or do you believe that his love for Val was so strong, his need for her so great, that the loss of her has shattered the structural underpinnings of the universe? That he has, in his misery, been given the ability to move back and forth through time in order to try and win her back?

Which side of that line you fall on may surprise you. You'll believe in the reality of Henry's smashed-up timeline(s) one minute, then know for sure that the 80-year-old Henry at the kitchen table and the 41-year-old Henry in the park are just figments generated by the unbalanced mind of a 19-year-old Henry. The line between fantasy and reality will be completely blurred before you're done.

And this, in turn, will allow you to sink into the clean, precise style of Ferguson's writing. He has a way with the language (in particular the lyrical bits of it, the odd, dangly details of lived-in lives), but the cleverest trick he pulls is in never modulating his voice or tone. Any contextual clues as to the reality (or unreality) of any given moment have been scrubbed from the text, and it all plays out in a constant state of fluttering, haloed authenticity. You can taste the weedy, sour first beers that Val and Gabe share months after Henry's disappearance, hear the jangling syncopation of the songs in Henry's head, and smell the mold in the shower. Ferguson never shies away.

And whether the narrative is tracking Val's very real present, Gabe's guilt-stricken, infected, half-fantastical now, or any of the multitude of Henrys populating the past, present and future, Ferguson does not judge. He does not coddle. He simply tells his tale and lets it lie there, as beautiful and broken as anything else in the world, its veracity to be judged by those who can only look in from the outside.

Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his newest book.

Read an excerpt of The Lost Boys Symphony

Doctors who treat Medicare patients will face a huge cut, 21 percent, if Congress doesn't act by the end of the month. This isn't a new problem. While Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill agree that the formula that pays doctors who treat Medicare patients has long been broken, over the years they've been unable to pass more than temporary patches.

But the leaders of the House from both parties have come up with a plan that they think can fix a problem that has bedeviled Congress since 1997. On Thursday, it goes to the House floor for a vote.

If Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Speaker John Boehner win and their plan becomes law, it would kill what's known on Capitol Hill as the "doc fix," a near-annual exercise. Here's how it works: It would repeal what's called the sustainable growth rate formula, or SGR. Instead, Medicare would increase payments to doctors by one-half of one percent each year through 2019. After that, a system would kick in where doctors would receive bonuses and penalties depending on performance scores from the government.

"We as physicians, look we want to be paid on basically how well our patient does and that creates some challenges because you've got to have buy in for the patient but we know these systems work and they save money," said GOP Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) is a long-time physician who heads up the House Republican Doctors Caucus.

"I can almost say that with this passage I will have had a successful Congressional career up to date. I really believe it's that important," Roe, who said he was involved in the negotiations, said. "It's the first real change to Medicare in almost the last 20 years."

Boehner and Pelosi's plan would also extend funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program for two more years.

And on Wednesday it gained a powerful ally: President Obama.

"As we speak Congress is working to fix the medicare physician payment system," Obama said during an event marking the fifth anniversary of the federal health care law. "I've got my pen ready to sign a good bipartisan bill"

Later in the day, the administration followed up with a formal statement of support.

Though the bill has the White House's backing and bipartisan support in the House, it hit a snag in the Senate where some Democrats worry about language that would restrict abortions at community health centers.

Pelosi has said that the restrictions included in the bill are not a change in current policy. The bill also has the support of the chairs of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, which boasts 170 members.

"The language included in the bipartisan compromise does not further restrict women's access to abortion and the provisions expire along with funding – just as the current Hyde Amendment does," Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) said in a joint statement. "We will be supporting this bipartisan compromise, and we encourage other members of the Pro-Choice Caucus to do the same."

Still groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Federation of America remain opposed to the bill.

Lingering over the debate on the Medicaid provision was another fight in the Senate, over a human trafficking bill currently being blocked by Democrats over abortion language.

But this week, some Senate Democrats including Democratic Leader Harry Reid looked to differentiate between the two. Reid told reporters Tuesday that "the two provisions in the two bills are different. They're not the same, dealing with abortion."

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that she planned to support the Medicare bill too

"My objection in the trafficking bill is that this is private money, not a government fund, so it would establish a new precedent and that's what I don't want to do," she said.

While the debate over abortion-related language was the sticking point among Senate Democrats, there is also the question of cost.

According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, the bill would cost more than $200 billion over the next decade. The bill would add more than $140 billion to the federal budget deficit. And that's despite some savings that would come from higher premiums for some Medicare beneficiaries and cuts to providers like hospitals and nursing homes.