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There is little good news for drought-parched California in the latest forecast for the winter. There is about a 55 percent to 60 percent chance that California will come under the influence of La Niña during the fall and winter 2016-17, it says. La Nina is the name given to a general cooling of Pacific Ocean waters near the equator, the opposite of “El Nino.” What is means for California is general dry weather during the winter with less rain and snow than average. La Nina does pump more rain into the Pacific Northwest.

In January of this year, James Watson, an Australian scientist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, noticed an image that had been tweeted by a friend of his, a physician in Sydney. With a chain of progressively larger circles, it illustrated the relative frequency of causes of death among Australians, from the vanishingly rare (war, pregnancy and birth, murder) to the extremely common (respiratory disorders, cancer, heart disease). It was a simple but striking depiction of comparative risk. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done something like this for the rest of nature?’ ”Watson recalled.

In 1933, a number of scattered newspaper articles appeared across Southern California extolling the grandeur and beauty of some recently discovered massive limestone caves within the Mojave’s Providence Mountains near the old Bonanza King Mine. Known today as Mitchell Caverns, these geological wonders were named after Jesse E. “Jack” Mitchell who had initially explored the caves in 1929 and would later market them into a popular recreational destination accessible from the National Trails Highway, better known as Route 66.