If you have HBO, or your parents have HBO, or your girlfriend’s roommate’s dad has HBO, you’ve probably been watching The Last of Us, which is the #1 most popular show streaming right now. The story is set in an alternate but uncomfortably familiar reality where a pandemic has ravaged humanity. In this case, however, the outcome was much worse, because it’s not a virus that infects people—it’s a mind-controlling fungus. In the show, the Cordyceps fungus takes over the body and brain and compels its host to infect or eat any uninfected person it can find. And unlike in most entries in the zombie genre, the cause of this apocalypse exists in the real world.

On this edition of the Friday 8 O'Clock Buzz, guest host Beatrice Lawrence is joined by Dr. Jae-Hyuk Yu, Professor of Bacteriology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Together, Beatrice, Jae-Hyuk and his daughter Ezabell untangle fact from fiction in the representation of the Cordyceps fungus on the new HBO series.

Dr. Jae-Hyuk Yu is a professor of Bacteriology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s an expert on fungi, molds and fungal molecular genetics and genomics.

Photo courtesy of Erich G. Vallery / U.S. Forest Service via Wikimedia Commons