Supernovas and Brain Scans

I’m a little bit obsessed with layman’s astronomy – I downloaded NASA’s phone app within hours of getting my new Smartphone and excitedly check the news for Higgs-Boson updates.  The geek in me gets a toe-tingle when unrelated  fields of research interact with one another and they renovate each other’s thinking; this TEDx talk about interactions between astronomers and neurologists is a fascinating example. PhD candidate Michelle Borkin explains how a research tool like a 3D slicer developed for brain research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston helped astronomers discover the more intricate details about how supernovas explode. How else has the field of medicine been guided by the use of other science?