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Less than a month after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin took the extraordinary step of pausing all operations for 24 hours to “address extremism in the ranks.” Pentagon officials had been shaken by service members’ prominent role in the events of Jan. 6. Of the 884 criminal defendants charged to date with taking part in the insurrection, more than 80 were veterans. That’s almost 10% of those charged. More remarkable, at least five of the rioters were serving in the military at the time of the assault: an active-duty Marine officer and four reservists. Service members’ involvement in the insurrection has made the spread of extremism – particularly white nationalism – a significant issue for the U.S. military. Solving the problem A blu...

It might sound like a bad movie, but extreme wildfires can create their own weather – including fire tornadoes. It happened in California as a heat wave helped to fuel hundreds of wildfires across the region, many of them sparked by lightning. One fiery funnel cloud on Aug. 15 was so powerful, the National Weather Service issued what’s believed to be its first fire tornado warning. So, what has to happen for a wildfire to get so extreme that it spins off tornadoes? As professors who study wildfires and weather, we can offer some insights. How extreme fire conditions form Fires have three basic elements: heat, fuel and oxygen. In a wildland fire, a heat source ignites the fire. Sometimes that ignition source is a car or power line or, as the West saw in mid-August, lightning strikes. Ox...

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Extreme wildfires can create their own dangerous weather, including fire tornadoes – here’s how