It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, March 22, 2026
Mayo Clinic study demonstrates safety, feasibility of delivering chemotherapy at home
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In a study published in NEJM Catalyst, Mayo Clinic researchers have demonstrated that chemotherapy can be safely delivered in patients' homes.
In the pilot study, a multidisciplinary team delivered 93 IV chemotherapy infusions to 10 patients in their homes. Researchers reported no treatment-related infusion reactions or catheter-related infections, supporting the safety and feasibility of this approach.
"Cancer care has traditionally required patients to spend long hours in infusion centers, often far from home," says Roxana Dronca, M.D., site director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Florida and director of Mayo Clinic Cancer CARE Beyond Walls. "This model allows us to safely bring high-quality care directly to patients, reducing burden while maintaining the standards patients expect from Mayo Clinic."
The study highlights the potential of home-based chemotherapy to reduce the physical, emotional and financial burdens associated with cancer treatment. Patients avoided travel time and experienced fewer disruptions to daily life while maintaining a continuous connection with their care team through virtual visits and remote monitoring.
Most participants surveyed reported high satisfaction with at-home care and said they would recommend the model to others.
"This approach is about more than convenience," Dr. Dronca says. "It's about improving quality of life during treatment and expanding access to care for patients who may face barriers to reaching traditional cancer centers."
To build on these findings, Mayo Clinic is still enrolling patients in a randomized clinical trial that launched in August 2023 to evaluate home-based chemotherapy compared with standard infusion care. This study will examine safety, patient experience, outcomes and costs, with the goal of expanding access to high-quality cancer care and reducing barriers to clinical trial participation.
Dr. Dronca is the first author of the pilot study, and Cheryl Willman, M.D., the Stephen and Barbara Slaggie Executive Director, Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs, is the senior author. For a complete list of authors, disclosures and funding, review the study.
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About Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for additional Mayo Clinic news.
About Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center Designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute, Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center is defining the cancer center of the future, focused on delivering the world's most exceptional patient-centered cancer care for everyone. At Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, a culture of innovation and collaboration is driving research breakthroughs in cancer detection, prevention and treatment to change lives.
Journal
NEJM Catalyst
Article Title
Cancer CARE (Connected Access and Remote Expertise) Beyond Walls — Safety, Feasibility, and Patient Experience of Home-Based Chemotherapy
Article Publication Date
18-Mar-2026
The freshwater hidden beneath the Great Salt Lake
In a first of its kind breakthrough, Utah geophysicists used electromagnetic data from airborne surveys to characterize a deep freshwater reservoir under Utah shrinking saline lake
A potentially huge underground reservoir of freshwater beneath the Great Salt Lake is coming into sharper focus with a new study that used airborne electromagnetic (AEM) surveys to X-ray geologic structures under Farmington Bay and Antelope Island off the lake’s southeastern shore.
An analysis of this data by University of Utah geophysicists shows that freshwater saturates the sediments beneath the lake’s hypersaline surface to depths of 3 to 4 kilometers, or about 10,000 to 13,000 feet. The helicopter-borne geophysical survey was conducted last year after Utah scientists documented freshwater welling up under pressure at several spots on the lake’s exposed playa in Farmington Bay, manifesting as strange phragmites-choked mounds.
The study demonstrated for the first time the ability of AEM methods to detect freshwater underneath thethin layer of conductive salt water at the surface of the Great Salt Lake, according to lead author Michael Zhdanov. His team also characterized the spatial extent of the freshwater reservoir beneath Farmington Bay and studied the potential depth of freshwater-saturated sediments by delineating the basement structure.
“We were able to answer the question of how deep is this potential reservoir, and what is its spatial extent beneath the eastern lake margin. If you know how deep, you know how wide, you know the porous space, you can calculate the potential freshwater volume,” said Zhdanov, a distinguished professor of geology & geophysics and director of the Consortium for Electromagnetic Modeling and Inversion, or CEMI.
A larger state-funded research effort focused on a newly discovered aquifer
The results appear in the Nature-affiliated journal Scientific Reports. This study is part of a larger research project led by the U’s Department of Geology & Geophysics and funded by the Utah Department of Natural Resources to understand the groundwater beneath Great Salt Lake, the largest terminal lake in the Western Hemisphere.
Overseen by some of the geology department’s most senior faculty and their graduate students, this effort has already resulted in two other important papers, with more to follow.
The evidence produced in this new study suggests that freshwater is entering the subsurface toward the lake’s interior, not its periphery as would be expected, according to hydrologist Bill Johnson, a co-author on all the Great Salt Lake groundwater papers.
“The unexpected part of this wasn't the salt lens that we see near the surface across the playa. It's that the freshwater underneath it extends so far in towards the interior of the lake and possibly under the entire lake. We don't know,” Johnson said on a recent appearance on KPCW’s Cool Science Radio show. “What we would normally expect as hydrologists is that that brine would occupy the entire volume underneath that lake. It's denser than the freshwater. You'd expect the freshwater from the mountains to come in somewhere at the periphery. But we find it's coming in towards the interior. And there's what appears to be deep volume of this freshwater coming in underneath that saline lens.”
A potential water source to mitigate dust pollution
These studies were triggered by the appearance in recent years of circular mounds, each 50 to 100 meters in diameter and covered with 15-foot-tall thickets of reeds, on the dried-out bed of Farmington Bay. The lake’s declining water levels have exposed 800 square miles of lake playa which is now becoming a major source of dust pollution blowing into Utah’s population centers.
Johnson, a professor of geology and geophysics, wants to explore whether the artesian groundwater could be safely tapped to mitigate the dust which contains toxic metals.
“There are beneficial effects of this groundwater that we need to understand before we go extracting more of it. A first-order objective is to understand whether we could use this freshwater to wet dust hotspots and douse them in a meaningful way without perturbing the freshwater system too much,” Johnson said. “To me, that's a primary objective because it's very practical and it's unlikely we'll be able to fill Farmington Bay and other parts of the playa enough to avoid some dust spots appearing at the higher elevations. This would be a great way to get at that.”
Johnson and his Utah colleagues, including Mike Thorne and Kip Solomon, are seeking funding to expand the groundwater studies to cover a much larger portion of the lake.
This latest paper measured electrical resistivity to a depth of about 100 meters via airborne electromagnetic surveys to discern freshwater from brine, which is far more electrically conductive. To see if this could be done, Johnson and Zhdanov hired a geophysical crew from Canada to fly electromagnetic equipment dangled under a helicopter in February 2025. The helicopter flew 10 east-west survey lines spanning Farmington Bay and across the northern portion of Antelope Island, for a total of 154 miles.
Looking under the playa
Zhdanov’s team analyzed the resulting data to create a map of the saline-freshwater interface. It showed how one phragmites mound sat above a spot where freshwater pushed through a gap in the impervious layer underlying the lake.
“Red means very conductive, blue is resistive,” Zhdanov said while explaining the map. “You clearly see near surface is saline water, 10 meters underneath is resistive freshwater. You see clearly it’s everywhere.”
Zhdanov’s research group CEMI has developed a technique to build 3D images of Earth’s subsurface by integrating electromagnetic data gathered aerially with magnetic measurements. Applied in this study, the researchers were able to create a tomographic image extending deep beneath Farmington Bay, providing critical insights into its geological and hydrological structure.
The results of the magnetic data inversion show that the basement under the Farmington Bay playa, is relatively shallow, less than 200 meters down, but then abruptly plunges to 3 to 4 kilometers. The drop-off, which occurs under the phragmites mound, represents a significant structural boundary that should be more fully explored.
“This is why we need to survey the entire Great Salt Lake. Then we’ll know the top and the bottom,” Zhdanov said. “To study the top we use airborne electromagnetic methods, which gives us the thickness of the saline layer and where the freshwater starts under the saline layer. To study the bottom, we use magnetic data. We use different techniques to study the vertical extent of this freshwater-saturated sediments, to find the depth to the basement.”
This pilot study covered just a sliver of the lake, but Zhdanov believes his team can fly airborne electromagnetic survey lines spanning the lake’s entire 1,500-square-mile footprint.
A lake-wide airborne survey could help guide regional water-resource planning and inform similar searches for freshwater under terminal lakes worldwide.
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The study was published in Scientific Reports under the title, “Airborne Geophysical Imaging of Freshwater Reservoir Beneath the Eastern Margin of Great Salt Lake.” Co-authors include Michael Jorgensen, Bill Johnson, and Kip Solomon of the U Department of Geology & Geophysics, and Leif Cox of TechnoImaging, a university spinoff founded by Michael Zhdanov in 2005. Funding came from Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Great Salt Lake Commissioners' Office, and the Consortium for Electromagnetic Modeling and Inversion (CEMI) at the University of Utah.
Map of the airborne electromagnetic survey area overlaid on the ESRI World Imagery basemap. Flight-
line locations are shown in red and cross Antelope Island and Farmington Bay. The circles indicate locations of phragmites mounds.
University of Utah
A helicopter lifts off from Antelope Island carrying electromagnetic survey equipment for a geophysical data-gathering mission over Farmington Bay in February 2025.
Swedish old-growth forests store 83 percent more carbon than managed forests, according to a new study from Lund University. The difference is substantially larger than previous estimates and is mainly due to large carbon stocks in the soil.
The study, published in the scientific journal Science, is the most comprehensive mapping of how much carbon is stored in Swedish old-growth forests to date. The results show that old-growth forests store 78–89 per cent more carbon than managed forests in living trees, dead wood, and in the soil down to a depth of 60 centimetres.
“The most surprising result is the large amounts of carbon stored in the soil of old-growth forests. It is the same amount as all the carbon in managed forests - trees, dead wood, and soil, combined,” says Anders Ahlström, researcher at the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences at Lund University.
The work behind the study took nearly ten years. Because there was no national map of old-growth forests, the researchers first had to identify and map forests that had been very little affected, or not affected at all, by direct human activity. Extensive fieldwork was then carried out across the country, including nearly 220 soil pits dug to a depth of one meter to measure carbon storage in the soil.
The total difference in carbon storage between old-growth forests and managed forests -including carbon stored in wood products - is about 3 to 8 times greater than previous estimates. This difference corresponds to approximately 211 years of Sweden’s current fossil carbon dioxide emissions, or about 1.5 times all fossil emissions since 1834.
“Carbon stored in wood products from harvested forests is relatively small and does not even compensate for the difference in dead wood, let alone the differences in living trees and soil. This is because most products are short-lived, such as paper and bioenergy, where the carbon quickly returns to the atmosphere,” says Didac Pascual, researcher at the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences.
Old-growth forests serve as a reference for what Swedish forests would look like without forest management and land use. The difference in carbon storage between old-growth forests and today’s managed forests reflects the combined effect of direct human land use, all carbon gains and losses—primarily since the late 1800s, and especially since the 1950s when today’s large-scale forest management was established.
“Comparing carbon storage in old-growth and managed forests is crucial, because contemporary measurements of carbon uptake can miss large historical carbon losses. Carbon storage shows the full picture over time. Old-growth forests serve as a reference for understanding how forest management affects ecosystems and the carbon balance,” says Anders Ahlström.
The results are relevant to discussions about the role of forests in the climate transition. The large differences in carbon storage implies that converting natural forests into managed forests leads to much greater losses of carbon or potential carbon uptake than previously estimated. This affects calculations of the climate benefits of forest products such as bioenergy and building materials.
“Converting old-growth forests reduces the landscape’s carbon storage more than previously believed. Protecting remaining old-growth forests and allowing unmanaged forests to recover could provide substantially greater climate benefits than earlier studies have shown. A large portion of the clear-cutting that occurs each year takes place in old-growth forests,” concludes Didac Pascual.
