Roger That: Former Scott airman overcomes obstacles in tonight’s ‘American Ninja Warrior’

Fans and friends of Tech Sgt. Randall Forsythe, the Air Force firefighter formerly stationed at Scott Air Force Base, will find out tonight if he advances to the championship stage of NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior,” the obstacle racing program that has become one of the big hit shows of summer.

The American Ninja Warrior competition will air its Military Finals episode tonight at 7 p.m. on KSDK/Channel 5 and will repeat on Tuesday night on the Esquire network. In a show taped in San Pedro, Calif., that aired more than a month ago, Forsythe made the final round of the all-military competition comprised of active duty and National Guard troops and military veterans. Forsythe has since moved to a new duty station in Pennsylvania.

The program, which features a series of difficult obstacles that test contestants’ upper body strength, leaping ability and stamina, has inspired a cult following. So far no one has completed every stage of the American championship course to claim a grand prize that today stands at $1 million.

If he finishes in the top 15 during the all-military finals, then Forsythe will join 14 other finalists who will compete next month for the $1 million prize on the championship course in Las Vegas, which goes by the name of Mount Midoriyama. A total of 75 contestants from five regional competitions will compete on the infamous Mount Midoriyama course.

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The Navy has announced that it will buy power from a sprawling solar farm in the Arizona desert to help power 14 military installations in California, in the largest renewable energy purchase by the U.S. government to date, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

San Diego-based Sempra Energy expects to have the Mesquite 3 solar facility online in 2016. The 150 megawatt solar array is being built at a power complex 60 miles west of Phoenix, and has the capacity to power nearly 100,000 California households at one time by one common measure.

The Western Area Power Administration, which markets and delivers hydroelectric power across 15 states, helped broker the power contract, which will supply a third of the power to 14 Navy and Marine Corps installations, including Naval Base Coronado.

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A research team at Johns Hopkins University says they have found a unique honeycomb pattern of broken and swollen nerve fibers in brains of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who survived improvised explosive device (IED) blasts, but later died of other causes. In doing so, the team says they may have found the signature of “shell shock” — a problem that has afflicted many soldiers since World War I warfare, according to Reuters, the international news wire.

The team of eight researchers, led by Vassilis Koliatsos, professor of pathology, neurology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, studied the brains of five U.S. combat veterans and compared them to 24 other brains of people who died from causes such as car accidents, drug overdoses and heart attacks.

Koliatsos says the honeycomb pattern is unique to the combat veterans’ brains and was found in the frontal lobe which controls decision-making, reasoning and other executive functions.

“We typically think of traumatic brain injury as something that happens when an external force comes against your skull,” Koliatsos says. But he says they may have found a new type of injury unique to combat veterans exposed to an IED blast.

This story was originally published August 17, 2015 at 11:07 AM with the headline "Roger That: Former Scott airman overcomes obstacles in tonight’s ‘American Ninja Warrior’."