News

Thanks to two video games and a television adaptation, "The Last of Us" has managed to make us far more wary of the noble mushroom than we used to be. Well, more specifically, the cordyceps mushroom that brings about the end of the world and turns humanity into various forms of infected that look like raging, roaring fungi. But just how much of the homegrown danger in HBO's beloved post-apocalyptic series holds true? Will the world crumble under such a ferocious fungus? Well, like a lot of horrifying infections from film and television that have some fact in their blood, the infection in HBO's show is real and survives by doing precisely what we see in "The Last of Us," albeit with smaller organisms.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (via Yale University) is a type of fungus that infects the brains of ants and spreads through the host, taking control of their muscles...