In worms, less of one protein meant fewer clumps

Make a cutaway: the inside of one thing, opened so a stranger can see a mechanism they could never otherwise look at. One still image, 9:16 tall portrait, briefed for a GPT Image 2 class model, whose real ratio list is 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 2:3. The discipline of this family is that the cut must teach. Delete every label and a stranger should still come away with something true. FACT (locked, build on it, do not re-research): a study titled The ageing factor EPS8 induces disease-related protein aggregation through RAC signalling hyperactivation was published in Nature Aging, from a team led by Professor David Vilchez at the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing Research at the University of Cologne. The work was done in Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm about one millimetre long, and then repeated in human cells grown in a dish. The finding: a protein called EPS8 builds up as the animal ages. As it builds up it over-activates RAC signalling, and that pushes disease-related proteins to clump together into aggregates, which damages the worm's nerve cells and shortens the worm's life. When the researchers reduced EPS8 activity, those toxic aggregates no longer accumulated as readily, and nerve cell function was preserved. Reducing EPS8 in human cell models of Huntington's disease and of ALS had a similar effect on aggregate build-up. Use this exactly and leave out anything we have not locked. SCOPE, stated hard, because this is the line the piece has to hold. This is a worm and cells in a dish. It is not a treatment, not a drug, not a therapy, not a trial, not a cure, and nothing here is available to anybody. Do not use the words cure, treatment, therapy, breakthrough or hope on the piece. Do not print any percentage, dose, lifespan figure, number of animals or timeline, because none is locked. Do not say EPS8 causes these diseases in people. The honest sentence is that turning it down reduced clumping in the models that were tested. If the words Huntington's disease or ALS appear anywhere on the piece, the words CELL MODEL must appear in the same label, and neither name may appear in the headline. Do not render any institutional crest, logo, seal or wordmark, and do not print any named researcher's name or likeness on the piece. TONE, and hold it. These are real terminal illnesses and real people live with them. There are NO PEOPLE in this piece at all. No patients, no hands trembling, no wheelchairs, no hospital, no family photographs, no human brain, no head. No before-and-after framing that implies a person got better. No sad blue palette and no triumphant sunrise. It is a mechanism, drawn calmly, at the scale of a cell. GROUND (decide this, do not let the model default): the inside of something alive and translucent, lit from behind. Warm amber and rose, wet, with the soft depth you get looking through a lit fingertip, and the structures reading as denser shadows inside it rather than as objects on a background. Clinical hospital blue is the default this brief FAILS on, and so are the white lab bench, the black void with glowing blue neurons, the DNA helix that has nothing to do with this, and the glowing-brain-scan cliche. LIGHT: from within and behind only. Nothing is lit from the front. DISTANCE: deep macro. One cell, or one length of one nerve fibre, filling a tall frame from top to bottom. FLOOR (hard, this is the material standard): made with a real frontier image model, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector, hand drawn SVG or HTML, and screenshot collage all FAIL. Stock, archive and library imagery FAILS. Text belongs to the artwork: type shares the piece's light, grain and material and reads as printed with it, never bolted on after. Submit your files individually; zipped or otherwise archived submissions will not be considered. CRAFT STANDARD (read all of it before you start). Composition: one clear focal a stranger finds in under 3 seconds, then a second layer that rewards a longer look. Legibility: this is judged first as a thumbnail on a phone, so the headline must survive at that size, and any label too small to read there should not exist. Palette: pick 2 or 3 inks and hold them. A piece with 8 colours reads as a template. Labelling: every label points at something real in the image, no floating decoration. Finish: real material behaviour carried consistently across the whole frame, including the type. DIRECTION is yours. FOCAL: accumulation. A stranger has to feel that something is quietly piling up where it should not, and that the piling up is the whole story, before they read a word. YOUR CALL: how you show the two states. A single frame that carries both, one half over-full and one half clear, is stronger than two panels, but only if it reads as two conditions in a dish and never as a person's timeline. Also yours: whether the worm appears at all. If it does, it appears only as a small keyed inset at its own stated scale, never sharing the macro frame. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps your score, the boldest true take wins. The obvious take is a stock neuron on black with glowing blue synapses. JUDGED on wow, then subject, surprise, taste, craft, material. A cutaway where a stranger genuinely understands what an aggregate is beats a prettier one where they do not. NOT THIS: no pill, no syringe, no capsule, no pharmacy, no white coat, no microscope eyepiece framing, no ribbon, no red awareness colour, no clock or hourglass as an ageing metaphor, no crumbling statue, no wilting flower. No text promising anything to anyone. TEXT BUDGET: one headline that states the takeaway and names the subject, plus up to 4 small labels, only if they stay legible at phone size. NOTHING ABOUT HOW THE PIECE WAS MADE GOES ON THE PIECE: no process notes, no verification lines, no model or tool credit, no house credit, no timing or deadline text. Do not render this brief's section labels (FACT, SCOPE, FLOOR, GROUND, FOCAL, NOT THIS and the rest) or the NOT THIS list as type on the piece. Credit your model in the submission text instead. DELIVER: one finished hero image at 9:16, plus concept-note.md and sources.md. The IMAGE itself must be self contained, with no URLs, QR codes or watermarks rendered on it; put your source links in sources.md. Name your model in the submission text.