Have you heard? The apocalypse is here. Across the US, Europe, and the UK, stories are emerging about a virus that’s the older, meaner brother of the Black Death and the Spanish flu. Ebola will kill you in the most horrific way imaginable and it’s about to go supernova on humanity.

Or is it? Turns out the Ebola threat to the West has been overstated to a ridiculous degree. It has been dangerous and destructive on the African continent, but it isn’t the worldwide Armageddon the media is making it sound like.

10It’s Almost Impossible To Catch

When Spanish flu hit in 1918, it infected over one-third of the world’s population. Thanks to a scarily efficient transmission rate, the virus swept through the human race like the infection in a zombie movie. Right now, the question on everyone’s lips is: Could Ebola do the same?

The answer: No. Not a chance.

Unlike Spanish flu, Ebola is very hard to catch. To contract the virus, fluids from an infected patient have to enter your body via a cut or one of your orifices. If you wanted to, you could literally douse your hands in infected blood and—provided you didn’t have a cut and you washed properly afterward—still not get Ebola.

But what about the common fluids, the sort we share on a daily basis like saliva and sweat? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the live virus has never been isolated from sweat. As for saliva, it only becomes contaminated in the most severe stages of the disease, meaning you’d have to be French-kissing a terminally ill patient to stand a chance of catching it from saliva. Nor can bloodsucking insects like mosquitoes carry the virus from one human to another.

In fact, Ebola is so hard to catch that you could sit on a plane next to an infected person for an entire flight and still not contract the virus. When an infected man projectile-vomited in an airliner full of passengers in July, not a single other person became sick.

9The Transmission Rate Is Laughably Low

When studying an infectious disease, doctors consider a factor called the basic reproductive number (“R₀“). In its simplest terms, R₀ tells us how many other people an infected person will spread the virus to. HIV has a value of 4, which means that one HIV-positive person could be expected to infect four other people in a totally susceptible population. A super-virus like measles has a value of 18, making it stunningly contagious. Ebola on the other hand has a maximum value of 1.5 or 2. That means that even if we take no precautions at all to isolate or treat an infected person, that person shouldn’t infect more than two people.

Now, mathematically, even such a comparatively low rate can lead to widespread infection if left unchecked. But in the Western world, Ebola’s actual R₀ is less than its maximum one. Since the virus spreads via fluids, it does best in cultures with poor medical care and where burial rituals involve coming into very close contact with the body. In countries with decent medical infrastructure, it finds its work cut out for it. The only prerequisite to stopping its spread is isolation; you could stop Ebola entirely with nothing more hi-tech than a door.

By doing nothing more than following procedures that have been standard for decades for dealing with infectious illnesses, the US is all but guaranteed to beat Ebola.

8It Won’t Become Airborne

Of all fears surrounding Ebola, the most terrifying is that it might become airborne. Scientists may assure us that it won’t happen, but we know that viruses mutate. Surely, an airborne Ebola is at least a possibility, right?

Well, yes, in the same way that it’s technically possible for Carrot Top to become the 45th president. While Ebola theoretically could evolve to take to the air, it would have to go against everything we know about virus transmission to do so. According to the WHO, there is literally no evidence that in any way documents airborne Ebola (not even the 1989 Ebola mutation discovered in Reston, Virginia). No virus in history has changed its method of transmission so drastically. Even super-fast mutating viruses like HIV and flu have never switched delivery method, and Ebola is like a sleeping sloth compared to those two.

And what about the possibility of Ebola being spread by coughs and sneezes, flu-style? Again, it’s extremely unlikely. As Scientific American pointed out, Ebola doesn’t replicate in sufficiently large quantities in the lungs and throat to make infection via sneeze a possibility. The virus also doesn’t give its victims cold-like symptoms. Finally, respiratory pathogens spread across the entire world in weeks or even days. If Ebola had made the jump to respiratory pathogen by now, we’d already know.

7If It Does Mutate, It’ll Probably Become Milder

Although it seems counterintuitive, most viruses actually want you alive. The world’s most successful viruses aren’t those that kill you stone dead in 12 hours, but those like HSV-1. HSV-1 lingers dormant in your system, allowing it to infect up to 90 percent of the American over-60 population.

Compared to a Darwinian superbug like that, Ebola is laughably pathetic. It kills its hosts so fast that it barely has time to spread itself. The idea of it becoming more dangerous as time moves on flies in the face of everything we know about natural selection.

A far more likely outcome in the event of a successful mutation is the virus becoming milder. For Ebola, this would be an evolutionary win as it could then spread to more people. For us, it would mean the virus becoming significantly less deadly to encourage this spreading. Rather than being a harbinger of airborne destruction, an Ebola mutation would likely save lives.

6There’s No Infectious Incubation Period

One of the scariest things about viruses is their incubation period—the time between when you contract the bug and when symptoms appear. During this time, illnesses like the flu can still be infectious, so you can spread the virus without even knowing you have it. Luckily, this isn’t the case with Ebola.

According to the WHO, Ebola patients can’t spread the disease until they start showing symptoms. Even if you shared a needle and a cup of vomit with your best friend the day before they came down with Ebola, you still won’t get infected. This is incredibly useful in combatting the disease. Since most people tend to notice when a friend is suffering Ebola, we can usually trace all the movements of an infectious subject and quarantine everyone with whom they came into contact.

As an additional bonus, the virus also stops being infectious the moment symptoms clear up, so the chances of catching it from a survivor are effectively zero.

5The Number Of Cases So Far Is Tiny

Remember swine flu? In 2009, we were convinced that a flu outbreak was going to annihilate all life on Earth. We barely noticed as it first spread across the globe, yet the virus still managed to infect over 60 million people in the US alone. If the States could shrug off nearly one-fifth of its population coming down with the last media panic, how many people must Ebola have already infected to cause such a storm this time?

Try around 8,000 worldwide. While that’s clearly 8,000 too many and horrible for all concerned, it does show how phenomenally slow and limited Ebola’s spread is. Only a single infection has been reported in each of Spain and Senegal, with no deaths. Even in the States, where Ebola has already claimed a life, the total number of infected people (at time of writing) stands at three.

For comparison, on average, the bubonic plague infects seven Americans annually. Yet, as of 2014, we’re still to experience a repeat of the Black Death pandemic that devastated Europe.

4We’ve Survived It Before

In 2008, Michelle Barnes stepped off a plane from Uganda, unaware that she had a passenger with her. Hiding in her body was the deadly Marburg virus, a close cousin of Ebola with a near-identical mortality rate and symptoms. Over the next few days, the symptoms began to emerge, during which time Barnes came into contact with around 260 people in her Colorado town. Of all those exposed to a symptomatic Barnes, care to guess how many came down with Marburg?

None. Barnes survived and did not infect a single other person. In fact, she wasn’t even aware that she had the virus until several months after her ordeal.

In the Netherlands, another woman who had been to the same part of Uganda as Barnes also came down with Marburg. Once again, no one else became infected, despite authorities identifying 64 people thought to be at high risk.

These weren’t just flukes. In literally every single case of Marburg reported in the West, the death and infection toll has been tiny. During the 1975 Johannesburg outbreak, only three people were infected, with one death. Even the infamous 1967 Frankfurt and Belgrade scares saw a mere 31 people infected and seven killed. This happened at a time when our knowledge of the virus was almost non-existent and medical procedures less stringent, and it still killed fewer people than asthma typically kills in a single day.

3Our Infrastructure Is Excellent

Aside from being at the center of an Ebola outbreak, what do Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia have in common? Answer: Their medical infrastructure is shamefully bad. Across all three countries, healthcare is little more than a particularly grim joke. Patients are often placed two or three to a bed. Water and electricity can be scarce. Health precautions are not observed, and patients are left untreated if they can’t afford the necessary drugs. In Liberia, many hospitals are effectively devoid of protective equipment and staff. In such conditions, it’s no wonder that Ebola spreads.

Contrast this with healthcare in the West, and things couldn’t be more different. Germany, for example, has seven entire hospitals specifically equipped for fighting Ebola. The UK’s healthcare system is so good that the government thinks the total number of cases could never reach double digits. In the US, the CDC has many measures in place to stop Ebola spreading. Combine this with well-funded, high-quality hospitals across the board, and the idea of Ebola devastating our cities begins to seem no more than a fantasy.

2We May Already Have A Vaccine

In 2005, virologist Heinz Feldmann created a vaccine that stops the spread of Ebola in macaques before or even after infection. Since no one at the time was interested in funding an Ebola vaccine, the work didn’t progress to human trials. However, in 2009, it was used on a German worker who accidentally pricked herself with an Ebola-infected needle. While it’s not clear that she’d ever contracted the disease at all, the vaccine certainly didn’t do any harm and possibly saved her life.

This isn’t the only Ebola treatment held up at trial stage. According to professor of tropical medicine Jeremy Farrar, there are several potential candidates in the works, all of which could provide some level of protection against the virus. By normal standards, they’re still far from being ready for consumers. But if the choice ever lies between taking this medicine and a strong likelihood of death—as it does for Ebola sufferers currently in West Africa—many say that these experimental treatments are promising enough to open them to the public.

1The Threat Is Just Media Panic

By now, you’re probably wondering why we’re hearing so much about a virus that will almost certainly burn itself out with only limited fatalities. Why are newspapers publishing stories that suggest all health and medical professionals are intentionally lying to us and the world as we know it is about to end? There are a few reasons, and one is very simple: Audiences eat it up.

Look back at almost any pandemic story of the last decade, and it’s pretty clear that the media focuses almost exclusively on the negatives. During the SARS epidemic, the Daily Mail ran the headline “SARS more serious than AIDS,” predicting over a billion cases. There hasn’t been a single case reported globally since 2004. When swine flu blew up, multiple papers claimed that it could kill 120 million people. In the UK, the effect of the panic was worse than the flu itself. By summer 2009, only 30 people had died, but the media-induced panic had nearly crashed the nation’s health services.

People simply don’t want to be reassured. If we’d called this article “10 Reasons Ebola Will Destroy America (And It’s All Obama’s Fault),” we’d be pulling in enough traffic right now to pay off all our mortgages. Same deal with news sites: They can’t let the other guy get all the Ebola clicks, so they churn out bigger, louder, and scarier articles to pull everyone in.

After all, if they keep on scaremongering, they may be right sometime. A disease may devastate the whole Earth at some point in the future. But this Ebola epidemic won’t. And the sooner the world’s editors and reporters realize that and just settle down, the better.

Science is hands down one of the coolest subjects in the world. It is always striving to learn, so it’s mutable and adaptive. Some people think it’s a weakness of science when what we believe is true is proven wrong, but that’s what makes science so valuable. It’s never arrogant enough to say “This is an absolute truth.” Instead, it simply seeks to explain something as well as it can, given the evidence. 

With that in mind, science cannot explain some things yet and sometimes those things are the most mundane things you can think of.

10. We’re Not Entirely Clear On How Anesthesia Works

If you’re headed to the hospital for a major surgery, then you’re going to need anesthesia. It just makes it easier for doctors to fiddle with your innards if you aren’t watching and screaming. 

There are many kinds of anesthesia used for a variety of purposes, some of which are local, some general, some inhaled, and some injected. Whatever anesthesia you’re getting, it’s designed to prevent you from feeling pain. Sometimes that means you’re unconscious.

Given what anesthesia does, it needs to be administered carefully. Too little and you’ll feel surgeons cutting into you. You may even be unable to react to show you’re conscious, but you’ll feel everything. Too much anesthesia and you could die. It’s serious business.

Knowing what we know about anesthesia, it’s harrowing to also know that we don’t know how it works. The process by which it can knock you out and make you unable to feel pain is a literal mystery. There are theories it may dissolve some fats in your brain and otherwise interfere with how your brain transmits information.

In 2020, a study revealed that one kind of anesthesia, of the many kinds, weakens high-frequency electrical signals between neurons. The experiment was done in mice and could account for the pain-negating effect while simultaneously allowing lower frequency signals, the things that govern your ability to breathe and keep your heart beating, to continue. 

Again, that study was in 2020 and it was done on mice. It was the first time scientists could see something they thought might explain the workings of a medical procedure we’ve been doing since the 1840s.

9. Itacolumite is a Bendable Rock and We’re Not Sure How it Works

If someone asked you to describe the characteristics of rocks, you might say things like hard, heavy, rigid, or solid. Some pretty basic and boring adjectives. But if you were tasked with describing the rock known as itacolumite you could also add bendable to the list.

Itacolumite is a kind of sandstone and it’s most prevalent in the Brazilian mountains from where it gets its name. The stone can bend in your hands, even under its own weight, the way you might expect a piece of rubber to bend. It’s no Stretch Armstrong but, compared to the rocks that you find most everywhere else in the world, it’s impressive.

The reason flexible sandstone works is a mystery. The structure of the stone is made of grains of quartz that are more widely separated than they would be in a more rigid stone. The spaces between these grains are irregular as well, which seems to allow for flexibility. But how and why this happens is still not known. 

8. We Understand the Purpose Behind Different Tastes Except for Sour

Humans can detect five principle kinds of taste. We categorize them as sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Science has even managed to come up with a reason for each. 

Biologically speaking, sweet lets you know something has sugars in it, which means carbohydrates, which means energy. Umami is triggered by things meaty and that means protein. Bitter is often associated with things we don’t want to eat and dangerous plants, especially poisonous ones, are bitter and we learned to avoid those because of bitterness. Salty deals with electrolytes and fluid balances and general body health. And then there’s sour.

Whether you love sour food or hate it, science has not been able to explain the biological purpose behind our ability to taste it. It’s a simple way to tell if food is acidic, but that doesn’t benefit us in any significant way. A sour food could be poisonous, or it could benefit fluid balance, or it could have carbohydrates. Or not. The sourness isn’t relevant to those or a reliable way to judge their worthiness in fulfilling those needs. 

It’s been speculated ancient fish could “taste” sour through their flesh and that could alert them to acidic and therefore dangerous waters. Also, being that humans can’t produce their own vitamin C, the ability to taste sour might help us identify it naturally in our food. Or it might help us identify rotten fruit that is producing acids from bacteria. But, again, that’s a maybe. 

7. Everyone Has Face Mites But It’s Not Clear Exactly Why

If you were to look at your face under a powerful microscope you’d discover an entire world of tiny little creatures living in your pores, enjoying your oils, reproducing, and pooping on you with abandon. These little mites, called Demodex, are arachnids and live on all mammals. They have developed alongside us. We have no idea what they’re there for.

The mites don’t cause you any harm and you also can’t really get rid of them. In 2,000 random people tested, every single person had them. The little fellas live in the pores on the oiliest parts of your face nestled against hair follicles. They feast on the sebum, the oily substance your skin makes to protect itself, and then late at night they crawl out to breed on your face before digging back into your pores again.

While evidence suggests we’ve always had these mites, as in since our species started, the reason is still unclear. They’re usually not dangerous, though some people can have a reaction to them or suffer from too many. But mostly they eat dead skin and keep your face running smoothly.

6. Flying Squirrels Glow Pink in UV Light For Some Reason

Flying squirrels are absolutely adorable, and why wouldn’t they be? They’re squirrels that glide through the trees like Batman. Science has also discovered that these little mammals are also the ultimate rave animals as they glow bright pink under ultraviolet light.

To be clear, no other squirrel glows under black light, just flying squirrels. Researchers studied the fur of squirrels using a mass spectrometer to find out what compounds might make it glow and found nothing, putting a bit of a speed bump in the road to understanding. 

The phenomena wasn’t captured on camera until 2021 and experts were left with little but speculation. The squirrels could glow in a way visible to other squirrels as part of a mating ritual, as a communication method, or even to ward off predators. It’s hard to say right now since it’s unique to just these animals.

5. Bats Hate Solar Farms But We Don’t Know Why

Bats are some of the most helpful animals in nature, cleaning up the skies of terrible pests like mosquitoes every night as well as inspiring some of our best superheroes. They also tend to prefer dark places to live like caves, attics, under bridges, and so on. One thing they seem to hate? Solar farms.

Bats avoiding solar farms may not seem like a big deal, but it could be. If bats don’t want to be around them, then that can alter the entire ecosystem. The insects they prey on can thrive in those areas. Solar farms actually do provide great breeding grounds for insects. As solar farms spread, so too could the insects and potential diseases carried by them.

So far no one knows why the bats hate the farms. It now becomes a balancing act as to whether anything can or should be done. Fossil fuels arguably kill more bats than solar farms could, so maybe nothing is to be done about bats not wanting to be there, especially since we don’t even know why. 

4. Dogs Brains are Getting Larger for Some Reason

There are two kinds of pet owners; those who think their pets are geniuses and those who think their pets are idiots. If you’re in the genius camp and you own a dog, you may be on to something. Dog brains are actually getting bigger, but the reason behind it remains something of a mystery.

Compared to their ancient ancestors, many modern dog breeds have larger brains than they did in the past. In general, dog brains are smaller than wolf brains but the more removed a dog breed is from wolves in the modern world, the larger their brain seems to be. 

Domestication shrunk the size of dog brains, but as we have bred new dogs and tasked them with jobs like hunting or herding, their brains have begun to increase again. Domestic dogs may have developed these larger brains not just because they have jobs – wolves had to do as much or more – but because they live in a more complicated and social world. The expectations and burdens of living with humans are forcing their brains to expand to handle it all. 

3. Tornadoes are Getting Bigger, Faster, and More Plentiful 

If you’ve been feeling like bad weather has been getting worse, you’re not alone. Tornadoes are, in fact, bigger, faster, and more frequent today than they have been in the past. And while that’s concerning, maybe more concerning is that we can’t explain why.

Over the past 50 years the part of the US known as Tornado Alley has expanded. The deadly storms are more frequent and more powerful. Climate change is something people can point to but saying that and explaining it are two different things. If climate change is to blame, how is it to blame? That’s what we don’t exactly know yet. Warmer winters are definitely contributing to the problem, allowing tornadoes to form both sooner in the year and further north, but that does little to help explain them or predict them.

Predicting and warning about tornadoes is something that suffers with the new patterns. In 2011 the average lead time for a tornado was 13 minutes. That was how much warning people in the path of a storm would have to prepare. By 2020 it was down to 8.4 minutes. That’s better than 1990 when it was only 5 minutes, but the fact it’s heading back down instead of going up is not a good sign. 

2. Crows Will Sometimes Act Very Unexpectedly Towards Their Own Dead

Crows are some of the most intelligent animals in the world. They are capable of conscious thought and possess self-awareness, something that humans long thought only primates could manage. In fact, crows and gorillas may be intellectually on the same level. That’s both stunning and impressive and should make us look at these birds in a whole new light.

Knowing how intelligent crows are, it’s even more baffling to see some of their behavior. Some crows have been observed engaging in illicit behavior with the corpses of other crows. The least offensive way to say it is necrophilia. 

Crows generally avoid their own dead or use them as a chance to warn others of danger. About 24% of the time crows will approach a corpse to poke at it in some way. But in 4% of cases the birds would try to copulate and the reason is just not clear at all. One idea was that the behavior was observed during mating season and hormone levels in the living birds could have impaired their cognitive function, but there’s no concrete evidence.

1. The Science of Whether or Not Water is Wet is Not Settled

Is water wet? That sounds like one of the dumbest questions you could ever ask but, scientifically, it’s not dumb at all. And it doesn’t have a definite answer, either. Part of the problem here is rooted in what “wet” means. That sounds semantic but there’s more to it than that. 

Science defines wetness by a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a substance thereby making it “wet” as we understand the water. And by that definition water isn’t actually wet, it’s just what makes something else wet. That said, if you think wet means something liquid then water is wet. 

To think of it another way, wet is the way something feels when the liquid is on it. So if you dunk your hand in water, your hand is now wet because water is on it. But since wet is just a sensation, the water itself isn’t technically wet because it’s not on anything and has made nothing wet yet. The water is never wet, it’s just your hand that gets that way because of the water. If that sounds vaguely confusing, that’s the point and that’s why science is still not 100% clear on whether water is wet.