Mushrooms are weird. Some taste amazing in risotto, and some shut down your organs and could kill you.

Fungi rot wood, they can grow in walls and they can spread through your body if they get the chance.

They move quietly and take over whatever they touch. You can breathe them in without realizing they have spores.

They're in the ground, in the air, on your skin.

And they feed on death.

They break down flesh and bone, well, everything.

We use them to bake bread, brew beer, and make medicine.

But they don't care about any of that because they've been around way longer than us.

And they'll be here long after.

They don't need us, but we sure need them.

The fact that the world is warming and the differential between environmental temps

and the temps that we hold in our own bodies decreasing is scary, right?

Because it means that there's a little

bit less of a jump that needs to be made if some environmental fungus is to adapt to a warm human

host. Dr. Carolyn Elia is a mycologist. She studies strange fungal parasites that can take control

of insect brains, for real. And if you've ever

watched the first season of The Last of Us, that might sound a little familiar. And Dr.

Elia talks about what's fact and what's fiction when it comes to the fungal-induced zombie

apocalypse of the show. And then something even more microscopic than fungi that's brought as breakthroughs in medicine,

the MRNA vaccine. It gives your cells instructions so your body learns how to fight on its own.

We'll get into those details later. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin and this is Curiosity Weekly from Discovery.

First, there's some new research you have to hear about.

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