The Fungus that Reduced Humanity to The Last of Us

Pop culture is again in the quickly decaying grasp of a shambling horde. For how many times zombies have appeared, they rarely have a real scientific reason to. Sometimes it’s a supernatural cause as in Dawn of the Dead. Other times it’s a generic "zombie virus" as in The Walking Dead. In all the attempts to make the dead live again, science usually takes a back seat to the gore—at least until the latest popular iteration of zombies. The Last of Us—a new videogame touted as a masterpiece—has the most scientific explanation for zombies yet, because it uses zombies that actually exist. Mind Control and Fungus Art In The Last of Us, 60 percent of humanity is wiped out by the genus of parasitic fungus Cordyceps. Out of the 400 species in the genus, all of these parasites make their homes inside the bodies of others---mostly in insects but some ...