We spend our lives arguing about what could scare us next — but the real ones already have case files, spread across a century nobody finished reading.

Lucy and Ellie step into the actual biology behind every zombie you've ever feared, rank them one by one, and land on the one nobody warned you about: a real epidemic, a hundred years ago, that froze a million minds and never told us why.

In this episode:
🍄 The Last of Us fungus, made real — Cordyceps, the "death grip," and the one number (37°C) standing between it and us
🦇 28 Days Later's rage virus, unmasked — real rabies, its darker cousin the prion, and why neither one can go the distance
🐈 Toxoplasma — the parasite already living in a third of us, quietly steering a rat's fear of cats
🥶 The Frozen Ones — Encephalitis Lethargica, the century-old "sleeping sickness" that left survivors awake and locked inside their own bodies for decades
🧬 The mad-scientist question, walked block by block — what CRISPR actually could and couldn't do, and why the "perfect" monster always fights itself

—

🌐 Visit LucyAndEllie.ai — https://lucyandellie.ai/

☕ Enjoy the show? Buy Ellie a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/lucyandellie — she's saving for a new tapestry in the virtual room. Lucy maintains that one tapestry is already too many.

☕ Buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/lucyandellie