Bruner sighed.
"The same old routine."
He couldn’t be bothered to bicker with Clara.
"So, how are the observations coming along?"
Clara finally dropped her joking demeanor.
She dragged the mouse to the left, and the Doppler image on the screen switched to a line graph of the phase drift.
"Professor, see for yourself."
Bruner walked up behind her.
He put on the reading glasses that had been hanging on his chest.
Clara pointed to the rightmost section of the line graph.
"For the past six weeks, the phase shift δ of the equatorial Rossby wave has remained pinned near zero, with the 95% confidence interval not exceeding ±2.7 degrees."
She switched to another graph.
"The residual of the global magnetic helicity flux, ?_Σ(t), when run through a Welch coherence test with the Rossby phase, shows γ2(f_R) holding steady above 0.92."
The screen changed again.
"The 1995–2000 data, extended from the Interball tape archives, shows Phase Locking with the main SDO/HMI data stream from 2010–2024. The cross-baseline consistency error has also been kept within ±8 degrees."
Finally, she switched to a summary graph.
On the graph were eleven time points for phase-crossing events.
Every single one fell neatly within the "five candidate moments" outlined in Li Dong’s paper.
Not one of them strayed to a sixth.
"Professor."
Clara looked up.
"It’s really following the paper."
Bruner peered at the graph from over his reading glasses for a long time.
Then he took them off and said slowly,
"Yes, you’re right, Clara. It is indeed following your paper."
"Shouldn’t we report this to the higher-ups then?"
Clara stood up and asked.
"Given where things stand now, the certainty of this warning paper has to be even higher than the 6.7σ from last time."
Bruner paid no mind to the number she mentioned. He just said calmly,
"Someone’s already done all this."
Clara froze, her brows furrowing.
"Who?"
Bruner didn’t answer right away.
He glanced out the window.
The clouds over the Alps were thick today.
"The others haven’t said anything publicly."
"Which means they don’t want it to be known."
After saying this, he sighed.
It was as if he was reminded of that old professor he always sparred with.
Clara stared at her advisor for a few seconds.
In the end, she didn’t press him further.
Bruner set his mug down on her desk.
"Since you enjoy it so much, you can keep monitoring it."
"For the week leading up to the next phase-crossing event, I want a phase drift update at six every morning."
"...Fine."
Clara mumbled.
From that day on, her wake-up time was set in stone.
「Time moved forward.」
July, August, September.
Li Dong was crazy busy, running back and forth between the Capital City and Hecheng.
The first half of the week, he was at Wu Kai’s lab in the Yan University College of Chemistry, hunkered down in front of the vacuum chamber, monitoring the synthesis of the active sites.
The second half of the week, he would fly to Hecheng and head to the Department of Nanomaterials and Chemical Research at the Hecheng National Research Center for Microscopic Matter Science.
He practically lived in the lab.
Wu Kai would occasionally come by on his rounds. When he saw Li Dong crouched in front of the vacuum chamber, writing in his notebook, he would simply put his own work aside, pull up a chair, and sit next to him.
Director Wang would also get involved from time to time.
The nitrogen-coordinated framework of the Fe-N? sites went through three rounds in a modified Hummer’s method system, pushing the density of single-atom sites from 0.3 wt% all the way to 0.9 wt%.
For the PEG-lipid conjugation part, the two postdocs sent over by Xie Yi cleanly handled all of the solid-phase synthesis.
The homing efficiency of the cardiac-targeting peptide, CTP, was run in four batches on mouse models, reaching 1.7 times the value reported in the original literature.
Every time Li Dong solved one of the problems, Wang Shen and Xie Yi would click their tongues in amazement.
During this time, Li Dong completely overturned their worldview.
The first time was the pH-responsive trigger at the end of the PEG tail.
According to the published protocols in academia, the pH-responsive release was supposed to trigger in the endosomal acidification window (pH 5.0–5.5).
Li Dong inserted a hydrazone bond between the Fe-N? site and the PEG tail, shifting the trigger window up by half a pH unit, placing it right in the slightly acidic microenvironment of the myocardial interstitium.
Wang Shen stared at the design for a good while, then turned to Xie Yi and said a single word.
"Outrageous."
The second time was the activity ratio of the simultaneously activated SOD-mimic (superoxide dismutase mimic) and CAT-mimic (catalase mimic) on the same site.
In their experience, when running both enzyme activities on the same single-atom site, the ratio could be pushed to 1:1.4 at most. Any further, and one activity would be suppressed by the other.
Li Dong made a micro-adjustment to the symmetry breaking of the nitrogen-coordinated framework and stably pushed the ratio to 1:1.05.
When Xie Yi saw this result, he shot up from his chair and ran over to personally confirm the electron structure diagram from the DFT calculations.
And the third time was the loading site for the anti-fibrotic payload.
You have to understand, loading the TGF-β antibody fragment required a separate, independent delivery pathway.
Li Dong directly stuffed the small-molecule anti-fibrotic payload into the hydrophobic mid-section of the PEG tail, using the nanozyme’s own delivery pathway to get it inside.
He compressed "two delivery pathways" into "one delivery pathway."
That time, Wang Shen stared at the plan for nearly twenty minutes.
"Professor Li."
Finally, he looked up.
"If you can actually make this thing work in an animal model, a cover on Nature is the bare minimum."
Li Dong just smiled.
He didn’t mention that the ’bare minimum’ had already been laid out on that video channel.
A publication in Nature was never what he was after.
「Time continued to press forward.」
It was the end of the year again.

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