The Very Real, Very Creepy Science Behind The Last of Us' Fungus
Zombies  By Wesley Fenlon  If zombies ever take over the Earth,
this is how it will happen.  Naughty Dog's The Last of Us has
already distinguished itself from the potential label of just
another zombie game thanks to its universally praised
storytelling, but there's another aspect of the game that makes
it remarkable compared to the Resident Evils and Dead Islands of
gaming: a grounded-in-reality scientific explanation of how
zombies came to be. The zombies in The Last of Us aren't your
classic George Romero shambling undead. They're fungi.  Or, at
least, their mutated bodies come from invasive fungi like
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Scientific American wrote a great
piece about the plausible zombies of The Last of Us by delving
into how this very real fungus kills and transforms its hosts.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is perhaps the closest real-world
analogue to the infected humans in The Last of Us. This spore
eats away at the tissue of a s