Further discussions with regard to recent observations and ongoing work.

If you would like to join the conversation:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83034966889?pwd=4HQppLjHEjY6aZSFWb5B1ha9etC04o.1

David

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For those who would like to join us tomorrow:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87523063980?pwd=E6etQbwcv3b6iIvzbTWx0ugEubhEKX.1

David

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This is a frame grab from a video of a talk given at a conference in Iceland in early 2023. It may have been one of his last public talks. I have put it on my website here.

During the final years of his life, Burkhardt became known to many people for a series of pathological investigations that examined unusual tissue findings, vascular changes, inflammatory patterns, and persistent clot-like material. His work attracted both attention and criticism. Yet whatever position one takes regarding his interpretations, there is a more fundamental point that deserves reflection.

The observations remain.

Science often presents itself as a sequence of conclusions. Textbooks are filled with established facts, accepted mechanisms, and settled explanations. Yet scientific understanding rarely begins there. It begins with observation. Someone sees something unexpected. A pattern appears. A finding refuses to fit comfortably within existing categories. Only later do explanations emerge, and sometimes those explanations change repeatedly over time.

Observation comes first.

That is one reason why Burkhardt’s work remains important. His legacy is not simply a collection of conclusions. It is a collection of observations that entered the scientific record.

Whether every interpretation ultimately proves correct is not the central issue. History is filled with examples where the initial explanation changed while the underlying observation remained valid. What matters is that unusual findings were documented, photographed, discussed, and preserved. Once observations disappear, the opportunity for future understanding disappears with them.

Over the past several months I have spent considerable time revisiting Burkhardt’s work alongside a wider body of literature involving blood microscopy, proteomics, vascular pathology, fibrinolysis, extracellular matrix biology, and soft matter systems. One lesson has become increasingly clear.

The most productive question is often not, “What should I believe?”

The more useful question is, “What was observed?”

That distinction matters because belief tends to divide people into camps, while observation provides a common starting point. Different investigators may disagree about mechanisms, significance, prevalence, causation, or interpretation. Yet meaningful discussion can only occur if the observations themselves remain available for examination.

This principle extends well beyond Burkhardt’s work. Across medicine, biology, and science more broadly, there are many examples of observations that arrived before adequate explanatory frameworks existed. Some were eventually discarded. Some were reinterpreted. Some became foundational. The challenge is that these outcomes are not always obvious at the moment the observation is made.

For this reason, I have increasingly come to view the preservation of observational records as an important scientific responsibility. Images, videos, pathology reports, laboratory findings, and descriptive accounts all form part of a larger archive from which future understanding may emerge. Explanations evolve. Observations endure.

I am not publishing the full paper today. It is still with colleagues for comment, and I want to give that process the time it deserves. However, I have placed the relevant source material, transcripts, videos, and references on the NixonLab website here so that readers can begin examining the observational record for themselves. On this anniversary, that seems the most appropriate first step: not to close the argument, but to keep the observations available.

Readers interested in Burkhardt's work may also wish to be aware of the recently published memorial volume Vaccinated – Dead: Histopathological Findings Following COVID-19 Vaccination by Ute Krüger and Walter Lang. The volume was published in memory of Professor Arne Burkhardt and documents many of the pathological findings that occupied his final years. My own copy is currently in transit, and I look forward to studying it in detail. Professor Walter Lang is holding the photo of Dr Burkhardt below.

Three years after his death, Burkhardt’s work continues to occupy an unusual position. It remains controversial in some circles, neglected in others, and largely absent from mainstream discussion. Yet the material itself still exists. The photographs remain. The pathology slides remain. The transcripts remain. The observations remain. The questions remain.

And perhaps that is the most fitting way to remember him. Not as a figure who claimed to possess every answer. But as a pathologist who continued to look.

Three years later, the observations remain before us.

What we choose to do with them is now our responsibility.

Rest in peace, Professor Burkhardt.
The observations remain.

Tomorrow we are re visiting the work of the late Professor Arne Burkhardt, Dr Ron Norris and Michael Merrick. Michael will present first then we will have a robust discussion!

Iff you would like to join us:

David Nixon is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: David Nixon’s Zoom Meeting

Time: May 24, 2026 07:00 AM Brisbane

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I am pleased with the website improvements and the conversations on soft-matter.

here’s a poem I wrote last night:

and here is a photo from blood I looked at yesterday showing a fibre formed from synthetic soft-matter which I think formed on the slide after a phase change from a gel state in the body.

For those who would like to join us in the …

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Hi everyone,

Over the last six months I have used Amazon KDP as a practical way to begin distributing my books, atlases, essays, and microscopy work. It has been a useful experiment. The sales themselves were never really the main issue. The value was in learning how to present the work: refining layouts, testing formats, improving image quality, understanding print systems, and gradually discovering what these books were actually becoming.

That period has now largely served its purpose.

What became increasingly clear during the process was that the project is not really a collection of separate books. The atlases, essays, microscopy sequences, historical notes, videos, and the broader soft-matter framework belong together. They function less as isolated publications and more as parts of a connected observational archive.

That realisation has led to a major restructuring of the NixonLab website.

The remodelled site is now bringing together the Soft-Matter Library, downloadable PDFs, microscopy sequences, essays, historical material, translated works, and supporting resources into one coherent public archive. Rather than operating simply as a catalogue, the website is becoming a longitudinal record of the work itself.

Over the last few years the work has expanded in several directions simultaneously. What began with observations under dark field microscopy gradually developed into a broader soft-matter framework spanning pharmaceutical preparations, blood, biological fluids, time-resolved structural transitions, medical ethics, observational medicine, and questions about how living systems organise under changing conditions.

That expansion made the limitations of the standard retail model increasingly obvious.

A commercial listing works reasonably well for a single isolated title. It works far less well for an evolving body of interconnected observational material that includes books, atlases, videos, frame sequences, essays, historical context, and ongoing revisions. The archive itself matters as much as any individual publication.

As part of this transition, I have therefore decided to end my Amazon publishing services. Printed editions should remain available until approximately 19 May, after which they may no longer be obtainable through Amazon.

Financially this is not a major sacrifice. The books were never built around a conventional commercial model. What matters now is independence, continuity, accessibility, and the ability to preserve the work in a form that remains coherent as the archive continues to grow.

The website-first model also allows something much closer to what this work actually is: an evolving observational record rather than a frozen product.

Readers can now move directly between atlases, essays, microscopy sequences, video material, conceptual framing, and historical discussion without the fragmentation imposed by isolated retail platforms. The atlas series, The Body as Soft-Matter, The Quiet Work of Health, Alien in My Teaspoon, the ethics material, and the broader Soft-Matter Library can finally sit together in the same environment.

In many ways this feels less like ending something and more like consolidating it.

These two images are taken from Playing with Pfire, where I first gathered some of the early visual and poetic material from this period. It is available here (the image is the link):

The Amazon phase helped build the foundation. The archive is the next phase.

For those who would still like printed copies, now is probably the right time to obtain them while they remain available. Otherwise, I encourage readers to visit the remodelled NixonLab website, explore the PDFs and videos, and follow the continuing development of the archive there.

As NixonLab subscribers, you clearly already have an interest in this material. If the archive has been useful to you, I would be grateful if you would help me circulate it by sharing the poster, the website, or any of the free PDF resources with others who may benefit from them. Independent archives do not remain visible by accident. They remain visible because people choose to pass them on.

I have also added a new support button to the website:

I am deeply grateful for the support many of you have shown over the last four years. It has helped make this archive possible, and it is allowing the work to continue growing.

I am currently locked out of Amazon unless I obtain a digital ID, so in the meantime I have been revamping my website at drdavidnixon.com.

So have a wee squizz.

I have now made all of my books freely available for download through the NixonLab Library, including the Atlas of Soft-Matter Structures series and the newer essays and discussion pap…

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Alien is an old word. Before it belonged to spaceships, it meant foreign, strange, not native to a place. That is the sense intended here.

Not necessarily from another planet.

Not at home in the place where it was found.

Three and a half years after taking some of the videos I am now reviewing, I think I am only beginning to understand what they may show. It is a little like learning, as a student, how the shape of a bird’s wing allows flight, and then later watching a military jet climb almost vertically into the sky.

The principle is related.

The scale, purpose, and consequence are not.

The problem with these videos is not that they are dramatic. In a way, the problem is that they are not dramatic enough. They do not announce themselves in the language modern institutions are trained to recognise. They unfold slowly. They require patience. They require comparison across frames. They require the observer to stay with a field long enough to notice that it is not merely changing, but reorganising.

That is why they have been so easy to ignore.

And why ignoring them may be so dangerous.

Much of our failure begins with perception. There is an old story about a man looking for his keys under a lamp-post. A passer-by asks if that is where he dropped them. No, the man says, but this is where the light is.

Modern biology has often done the same thing. It has searched where its instruments, stains, assays, categories, and mechanisms are strongest. It has found a great deal there. That should not be dismissed. But brightness is not completeness.

We find what our methods are built to reveal.

We miss what our habits are built to ignore.

Scale adds another blindness. Human beings are poorly built for scale. We fear what is roughly our size. We ignore what is too small, too large, too distributed, too slow, or too ordinary to command attention. The sky becomes background. The particle becomes irrelevant. The field becomes nothing because it is not a single object.

Between those errors, whole worlds may pass unnoticed.

Time adds another. We recognise music because the notes arrive close enough together. Stretch the same melody across hours, days, years, or generations, and it becomes weather, ageing, coincidence, policy, background. The tune has not necessarily disappeared. We have simply lost the ability to hear it as a tune.

This is one of the problems with the videos I have been examining. The events they record are not always obvious in a single still image. Some of the important changes occur across minutes. Some across hours. Some only become recognisable after repeated viewing, or after returning to the field with a different question.

The event was hidden in two directions at once: below the scale of ordinary sight, and beyond the tempo of ordinary attention.

Biology has always contained this problem. A child is shown the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, and is told this is metamorphosis. But metamorphosis is not those three things. Those are named stages on either side of the event.

The real process is the dissolution, reorganisation, folding, rebuilding, and emergence that occurs between them.

Miss the window, and you miss the transformation.

You see only the nouns.

This is a language problem, and therefore a thinking problem. The diagram does not necessarily lie. That is what makes it so powerful. The caterpillar is real. The chrysalis is real. The butterfly is real. But the diagram teaches us to think in nouns, while life is happening in verbs.

We name cells, tissues, diseases, stages, outcomes, pathways, cascades, and mechanisms. Naming is necessary. But naming can also become the point where observation stops. Once the process has been labelled, the mind relaxes. It thinks it has understood the event because it has placed it inside a known sequence.

Curiosity wants to follow the change.

Education, too often, asks for the correct label.

A child asks what happens inside the chrysalis. The worksheet asks for larva, pupa, adult. The answer is marked correct. The question is left behind.

Medical school intensifies this. The curriculum is printed. The guild is transmitted. At the time, most of us mistake the printed part for the education. We memorise bones, pathways, drug names, clotting cascades, diagnostic criteria, and the approved language of disease. We are too busy recalling what we have been told to notice what else is being installed.

It is an invisible phase transition. We enter as students of the body and slowly become members of a profession, absorbing its posture, reflexes, silences, and permitted forms of doubt.

Most of us are not merely ignorant.

We are ignorant of being ignorant.

In an environment built around mass memorisation, observation disappears into the haze.

Beneath the curriculum, or perhaps above it, sits the profession itself: hierarchical, credentialed, anxious, proud, and extraordinarily vulnerable to control. One does not need to corrupt every doctor. One only needs to control the channels through which doctors are permitted to know.

The tragedy is not that doctors lack intelligence. It is that intelligence has been trained to move within authorised corridors.

Modern life has deepened the problem. We now surround ourselves with things that do not grow, do not heal, do not develop, and do not meaningfully transform. Houses stand. Cars run. Computers update, but they do not heal as tissues do. Food arrives sealed, numbered, packaged, and still. Almost everything near us has already become what it is going to be.

Then we look at the body and expect the same obedience.

We have mistaken manufacture for nature’s deepest habit.

The machine became our metaphor because the machine was what we lived among.

But living systems are not finished objects. They are processes held in temporary form. Blood, tissue, repair, inflammation, clotting, scarring, embryology, cancer, decay, regeneration, and immune response are not simply things. They are organised transitions. They depend on boundaries, gradients, timing, fluid states, gels, membranes, fibres, vesicles, fields, and local conditions. They occur in scales and tempos that the ordinary clinical eye may not be trained to follow.

The videos I have seen sit inside that gap.

They show processes that are too small for ordinary sight and too slow for ordinary attention. They are subtle enough to be dismissed, unfamiliar enough to be renamed, and broad enough in implication to be rejected before they are examined.

The implications are part of the problem.

Some observations are rejected not because they are weak, but because accepting them would require too much else to move. A small anomaly can be tolerated. It can be bracketed, named, deferred, explained away. But an anomaly that touches biology, medicine, regulation, manufacturing, consent, public exposure, and institutional trust at once becomes too large for ordinary cognition.

The mind does not examine it.

It protects itself from it.

These videos ask too much of the viewer. Not visually. Visually, they ask only patience. Psychologically, they ask almost everything.

So what are the options here?

I may be mistaken. That must remain possible. But I cannot assume mistake simply because the observation is inconvenient. There appears to be a gap between what I am seeing and what the apparent state of the art has prepared us to recognise.

This week, while writing one of these episodes from another angle, I found an extraordinary sequence I had previously missed. It had been overlooked because it unfolded at a different scale, in a different part of the field, and over a different interval.

That is becoming typical.

The phenomenon does not announce itself by repeating at one size or one tempo. It has to be recognised through recurrence, patience, and return.

This is why still images are both powerful and insufficient. They can document a moment, but they may also conceal the transition that gives the moment meaning. A single photograph of a caterpillar tells us little about metamorphosis. A photograph of a chrysalis tells us something else. But the process lives in the interval.

The same is true under the microscope.

Some events count because they reveal capacity. An extraordinarily difficult billiards shot does not need to be repeated twenty times before one accepts that it occurred. A martial arts movement, executed cleanly once, demonstrates that the body is capable of that movement. Repetition strengthens the case, but it is not the only form of evidence.

A complex microscopic sequence, recorded clearly enough, may matter because it shows that the system can behave in that way at all.

Repetition strengthens evidence.

It should not be used to postpone looking.

This problem extends beyond microscopy. A lecturer once told us corporate fraud was like fly fishing. Float the right fly past the nose of a brown trout and it will rise almost every time. Motive and opportunity, he said. That was the whole river. There was always motive.

But catching trout is not inevitable in the crude sense. You still have to be quiet. You still have to read the current. You still have to place the fly where hunger, instinct, water, and timing meet. Among those who catch trout, confidence becomes almost indistinguishable from knowledge. They do not think of it as deception. They think of it as competence.

That, too, has a medical version. In medical school, the children of doctors often carried a confidence from an older place. They did not necessarily know more. Often they did not. But they knew the room. They knew how authority sat in a chair, how certainty entered a sentence, how doubt was hidden without being denied.

They had inherited the guild before the rest of us had found the door.

The curriculum was printed.

The guild was transmitted.

And behind the guild, beyond fraud and greed, sits the older question of control.

Fraud deceives people about what has happened. Control deceives them about what can be noticed. Greed explains appetite. Fraud explains deception.

Control explains why the deception persists after exposure.

That is the question that now matters most. Not only: why did this happen?

But why is it still happening?

If something was merely an emergency error, one would expect correction once the error became visible. If it continues after contradiction, harm, failure, and public exposure, then continuation itself becomes evidence of a deeper architecture.

A mistake stops when it is seen.

A fraud stops when it is exposed.

A control system continues.

That does not prove that every anomaly is meaningful, or that every failure is deliberate, or that every silence belongs to a single plan. Error, inertia, fear, ambition, ideology, incompetence, greed, and fraud can all coexist. But sometimes those explanations are too small. Sometimes fraud is only the hand in the pocket. Control is the stage, the lighting, the script, and the trained habit of looking elsewhere.

The hand is not always quicker than the eye.

It does not need to be.

It only needs the eye to be elsewhere.

That is why these videos matter. They may show something occurring outside the lamp-light of ordinary biology: at a scale too small to see, at a speed too slow to recognise, in a field too unfamiliar to name, with implications too broad to pass the filters intact.

I do not claim to have the final explanation. But I have seen enough to know that dismissal is no longer an adequate response.

The first task is not belief.

It is attention.

I am making the relevant video material and the supporting atlases available so that others can examine the observations directly. Watch the sequence. Move back and forth through the frames. Notice the field, not only the objects. Notice the intervals, not only the still images. Ask whether the apparent state of the art has prepared us to recognise what is occurring there.

View the first construction sequence video

The videos are not asking us to agree.

They are asking us to look.

The supporting atlases are available now on Amazon as a series, with paperback, hardback, and Kindle editions.

Thank you once again to everyone who continues to support this work.

David

www.drdavidnixon.com

Those keen to have further discussions in the morning:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86881894659?pwd=5nCjpWdgLkgI1YiLOgztz6zR4KMNyx.1

David

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I am increasingly embracing a soft matter framework for understanding many of the observations I have made over the last four years. I am currently publishing three atlases that present this work through that lens.

Atlas 1 focuses on pharmaceutical preparations, sessile droplet evaporation, crystal formation, vesicles, fibres, and recurring structural motifs.

Atlas 2 extends the same observational approach into blood and other biological fluids, where soft matter behaviour appears within a more complex cellular and protein-rich environment.

Atlas 3 focuses on transition: time-resolved changes, metastability, gel-like phases, field-level reorganisation, and the way structures persist, soften, collapse, or reappear over time.

Together, these atlases have helped me shift the question. Rather than asking too quickly whether a structure is an artefact, an organism, a contaminant, or an engineered object, I am trying to ask a more basic physical question: what kind of soft matter system is this, and what conditions allow these forms to appear, persist, change, or reorganise?

All three volumes should be available on Amazon from tomorrow.

That leads to the short reflection below.

Soft matter, constraint landscapes, and reorganisation

One of the difficulties in discussing unusual structures observed in biological fluids or pharmaceutical preparations is that the conversation often collapses too quickly into fixed categories. Is it artefact or organism? Contamination or design? Inert debris or active material? These categories may be useful at times, but they can also narrow the discussion before the physical behaviour has been properly described.

A softer and more useful starting point may be to ask how matter organises under constraint, and what happens when different soft matter systems are brought into contact.One of the difficulties in discussing unusual structures observed in biological fluids or pharmaceutical preparations is that the conversation often collapses too quickly into fixed categories. Is it artefact or organism? Contamination or design? Inert debris or active material? These categories may be useful at times, but they can also narrow the discussion before the physical behaviour has been properly described. A softer and more useful starting point may be to ask how matter organises under constraint, and what happens when different soft matter systems are brought into contact.

For the sake of discussion, let us begin with two conservative assumptions.

First, soft matter is not an exception in biology. It is the default physical paradigm of living systems. Blood, plasma, mucus, saliva, extracellular matrix, membranes, vesicles, proteins, lipids, gels, colloids, and cellular interiors all behave as soft matter systems. Their organisation is not fixed in the way a simple solid is fixed, nor random in the way a dilute solution may appear random. They are responsive, transitional, boundary-sensitive systems.

Second, when soft matter is observed in pharmaceutical preparations, one does not need to begin with intention. It is possible to treat such material, at least initially, as inadvertent or unintended contamination, or as an emergent consequence of formulation, storage, handling, evaporation, excipient behaviour, particulate burden, or local physical and chemical conditions.

From this starting point, an important question follows. Soft matter does not build from a single cause. It organises within what might be called a constraint landscape. That landscape includes composition, hydration, concentration gradients, ionic strength, pH, surface chemistry, confinement, temperature, charge distribution, boundary effects, mechanical forces, field conditions, evaporation, and time.

In biological systems, this constraint landscape also includes genetic, epigenetic, metabolic, cellular, extracellular, enzymatic, and immune conditions. In non-biological systems, such as drying droplets or pharmaceutical preparations, the landscape may be more obviously physicochemical, colloidal, interfacial, and environmental. But the principle is the same: structure emerges from many interacting constraints, not from one isolated cause.

This becomes especially important if biological and non-biological soft matter systems are brought into contact. They may no longer behave independently. Their constraint landscapes may couple.

This does not mean that a non-biological material becomes biological. It means that its organisation, persistence, or transition behaviour may become shaped by biological conditions. Proteins, salts, lipids, membranes, extracellular material, cellular debris, enzymes, temperature, pH, charge gradients, and fluid dynamics may all alter what the introduced material does. At the same time, the introduced material may perturb the biological system, changing local viscosity, boundary formation, particulate aggregation, gel behaviour, vesicle dynamics, or phase transitions.

This is why the language of self-assembly may sometimes be too narrow. It can imply that a structure builds itself independently, from isolated components, according to an internal programme. That may sometimes be a useful description, but it is not always the most careful one.

Perhaps the better word is reorganisation.

Soft matter does not build in isolation. It reorganises within constraints. Those constraints may be biological, physicochemical, environmental, or interfacial. When a non-biological soft matter system enters a biological one, the two may form a coupled constraint landscape. The resulting structures may therefore reflect not a single source or intention, but the reorganisation of material under shared conditions.

That shift matters. It changes the question from “what assembled this?” to “what conditions allowed this form to reorganise, persist, or change?” It moves the discussion away from simplistic categories such as artefact versus organism, contamination versus design, or inert versus active. It allows a more careful question: what happens when soft matter systems meet, and how do their constraints reshape one another?

I am also working on Kindle versions using Amazon’s newer textbook format, which preserves the PDF layout and may eventually allow some key videos to be embedded. For now, though, the print books are pretty cool too.

Thank you again for those that continue to support me. Without which none of this would be possible.

All the best for the remainder of the weekend.

David

www.drdavidnixon.com

www.journalbnt.org

(currently off-line but available at www. drdavidnixon.com)

Working on Atlas number 3 which goes some way towards explaining the strange stuff I saw in my early videos of Pfizer Comirnaty. I look forward to making that all available soon via Amazon and hopefully a PDF that can be shared.

Tomorrow after the first hour Sally Clarke will be joining us from the Philippines to discuss infant mortality statist…

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This week I have been working on my first two atlases essentially Volume 1 on Pfizer Comirnaty and dental anaesthetic but have also included Masterpeace, Affluria Quad influenza vaccine and a generic budesonide nebulising solution.

All show phase changes under experimental conditions i.e. gel, colloids, fibres and crystals.

I am also putting the f…

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Such a challenge to stay focussed amongst all the worthy distractions…

I have also completed a second atlas on blood and I am revising my first Atlas on Soft- Matter structures - mainly to align it with improvements that I learnt writing the second atlas but also to include some relevant discoveries.

But not far away…

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I have made a good start on the Atlas of Soft Matter Structures in the Blood and the Subastack Post on the first sequence is now on my website:

Substack posts - Dr David Nixon - 1

I look forward to further discussions tomorrow with a focus on changes in the blood over the last 4 years.

Cheers

David

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85621593001?pwd=jwITd…

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I am currently completing an Atlas of Soft Matter Structures in the Blood, and this sequence forms the opening section.

The fibres observed in these images appear to arise through a phase change on the slide in response to environmental conditions. This process occurs rapidly—often within seconds of sample placement, and frequently before the field can be examined in detail.

These structures are not artefacts, and they do not behave in ways we would typically anticipate.

What you are about to see is not a single image, but a sequence.

Each frame is taken from the same preparation of blood following placement under a coverslip. Rather than isolated snapshots, these images should be read as stages within a continuous process—one driven by phase behaviour in a soft matter system.

Within minutes of confinement, the field begins to organise. The initially diffuse material separates into distinct domains, with bright, continuous boundaries forming a connected network across the sample. These boundaries define regions of differing composition and optical response, establishing structure before any obvious cellular breakdown is visible.

This early organisation is not gradual. It is rapid, and it is systemic. The field does not slowly assemble—it differentiates.

Within this evolving structure, filamentous forms begin to appear.

These fibres are not treated here as fixed objects with a defined origin. Instead, they are approached as process-derived structures emerging within the same phase environment that produces the surrounding boundaries. In early frames, they may be embedded within the boundary-defined domains, conforming to local geometry. However, as the system evolves, a consistent behavioural distinction becomes apparent.

The fibres persist.

They maintain internal coherence and a clearly defined boundary, even as the surrounding material continues to reorganise.

A key feature of this sequence is what does not happen.

Vesicle-like domains, particulate fields, and later cellular remnants may sit in close proximity to the fibre, sometimes appearing to surround or intersect it. Yet there is no visible merging, no loss of structural identity, and no exchange of internal material. This behaviour is described here as non-integration rather than isolation. The fibre exists within the system, but does not participate in the same transformations as its surroundings.

Over time, this distinction becomes more pronounced.

Across hours and days, the surrounding environment undergoes significant change. Boundaries thicken, domains reorganise, and cellular components degrade. Despite these changes, the fibre remains. Its internal particulate structure persists, its boundary remains intact, and its overall geometry is preserved.

This persistence extends beyond 12 days in the sequence presented here.

Not all structures follow the same pathway. Some vesicle-like domains stabilise through boundary reinforcement and internal clearing, while network-like formations emerge along interfaces at later stages. The system does not converge toward a single outcome. Instead, multiple structural states coexist under the same conditions.

The interpretation presented here is intentionally restrained.

The emphasis is placed on what can be directly observed: rapid phase separation, boundary formation, fibre emergence, non-integration, and long-duration stability. No assumptions are made regarding origin or function beyond these observable features.

The invitation is simple.

Look closely. Follow the sequence. Notice what changes—and what does not.

Plate 1.
Early field under confinement showing rapid phase organisation with diffuse material separating into boundary-defined domains. Magnification ~10x.

Plate 2.
Development of a connected boundary network with continuous interfaces defining regions of differing optical density. Magnification 40x.

Plate 3.
Further consolidation of boundary structures with increased definition and spatial continuity across the field. Magnification ~100x.

Plate 4.
Emergence of vesicle-like domains within a boundary-defined network, indicating compartmentalisation within the phase-separated field. Magnification ~50x.

Plate 5.
Thickened boundary regions with increased structural density and persistence across the field. Magnification 200x.

Plate 6.
Curved filamentous structure emerging within a particulate field, showing early fibre formation embedded within the surrounding phase. Magnification 40x.

Plate 7.
Fibre with internal particulate distribution extending through a dense field of vesicle-like domains. Magnification 400x.

Plate 8.
More discrete fibre structure with reduced surrounding density, demonstrating early separation from the boundary-defined environment. Magnification ~100x.

Plate 9.
Fibre maintaining internal coherence while adjacent particulate structures remain spatially distinct. Magnification 200x.

Plate 10.
Degraded red blood cells within a boundary-defined field showing stable partitioning across domains after four days. Magnification 200x.

Plate 11.
Bounded vesicle-like domain with a defined boundary and minimal internal structure. Magnification 200x.

Plate 12.
The same domain after twelve days, showing internal structuring with preservation of overall boundary stability. Magnification 200x.

Plate 13.
Fibre within a boundary-defined field at lower magnification after twelve days, demonstrating persistence and clear separation from surrounding domains. Magnification 40x.

Plate 14.
Close-up of the same fibre after twelve days, showing maintained boundary integrity and ongoing internal organisation. Magnification 200x.

What this sequence offers is not a conclusion, but a reference point. It shows how structure can emerge rapidly, differentiate, and persist within a dynamic system—often before we have time to observe the initial conditions. The patterns are there to be seen. Whether they align with current expectations or not, the task remains the same: to observe carefully, to compare across samples and time, and to allow the material to speak through its behaviour. This atlas is intended as a contribution to that process.

This work sits alongside a broader body of published material exploring structure, behaviour, and interpretation across complex systems.

Atlas of Soft-Matter Structures presents a visual record of structures observed under dark field microscopy and sessile droplet evaporation.

The atlas brings together image sequences that highlight phase behaviour, boundary formation, fibre emergence, and long-duration stability across a range of samples. Each sequence is presented as a progression, allowing the reader to follow the development and persistence of structure within a dynamic system.

The emphasis is on observation—what is seen, how it changes, and what remains.

The Quiet Work of Health presents a framework for navigating complexity in biological and health systems, with an emphasis on practical understanding and self-management.

Playing with Pfire: Poems and Pictures Vol 1 offers a different lens—exploring pattern, perception, and meaning through a combination of imagery and verse.

These works are available for those who wish to explore these ideas from complementary perspectives. At present they are available through Amazon, with additional formats and distribution to follow.

Acknowledgement / supporters

This work has been made possible through the ongoing support of the NixonLab community and the wider Micronauts group. Your observations, discussions, and willingness to engage with the material have shaped the direction of this project

To those who have contributed images, insights, and time, and to those supporting this work through Substack, thank you. Your support allows this work to continue.

All the best

David

www.drdavidnixon.com

www.journalbnt.org

David Nixon is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: David Nixon’s Zoom Meeting

Time: Mar 22, 2026 07:00 AM Brisbane

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Further discussions about soft matter systems and the technology that confronts us.

David

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I hope you saw the last post for those who want to join in tomorrow3:

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Cheers

David

Plate 112. Popular nutritional supplement preparation showing two square crystalline domains with complex internal structure connected by both a fibre and a secondary crystalline bridge. T…

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Its purpose is simple: to provide a visual reference for what is being seen under the microscope. Rather than asking readers to accept interpretations, the plates allow people to examine the structures directly and say, “This is what is being observed.”

For the past four years I have spent many hours examining droplets under a microscope.

What began as routine examination of pharmaceutical preparations gradually revealed something unexpected. As droplets evaporated on a glass slide, they reorganised internally, producing vesicles, fibres, geometric crystals, and complex structural relationships that appeared repeatedly across very different samples.

These observations have now been gathered into a visual volume titled:

Atlas of Soft-Matter Structures: Observations from Dark Field Microscopy and Sessile Droplet Evaporation

The atlas is now available on Amazon.
ASIN: B0GS9BCX26

Soft matter and phase behaviour

This atlas concerns what physicists describe as soft matter.

Between water as a liquid and water as a solid there exists an entire world of intermediate materials. Just as the transition from liquid water to ice represents a phase change, similar transformations can occur when liquids reorganise into gels, fibres, vesicles, or crystalline structures. These states are often less rigid than classical solids and may remain partially fluid or structurally dynamic.

Seen in this way, the vesicles, fibres, particles, and crystalline forms that appear during droplet evaporation may not represent entirely different substances. They may instead represent different structural states of the same material, emerging as local conditions within the droplet change during evaporation.

This became particularly clear during experiments in which fluorescein and crystal violet were added to lignocaine preparations. The dyes produced dramatic colour patterns under the microscope, but they also revealed something more important.

As the droplet continued to dry, these structures gradually separated and became more distinct. The internal organisation of the system became visible.

In other words, a uniform droplet reorganised itself into the very structures that appear repeatedly throughout this atlas.

From this initially uniform droplet, vesicles, particles, fibres, and crystalline compartments gradually emerged - structures that have since become familiar and ubiquitous features of the microscopic environments documented in this atlas.

Why this atlas exists

In discussions about unusual microscopic structures, people often begin by debating explanations.

My approach has been different. Before arguing about what something might represent, it is useful to document what can actually be seen.

Over several years I examined droplets from a wide range of materials under dark field microscopy, including pharmaceutical preparations, biological fluids, supplements, and simple control samples. Across these preparations a number of structural motifs repeatedly appeared.

The purpose of the atlas is therefore observational. It documents these structures and their relationships as they appear under the microscope.

Remembering haemostasis

I remember my haematology lectures on blood coagulation, or at least I remember that there was a great deal to learn at the time. The pathway diagrams seemed endless: this cleaves that, which activates this, which converts that. It was an impressive biochemical cascade.

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder whether medical students today are taught to think about blood as a soft matter system.

From that perspective, coagulation can be seen not only as an enzymatic cascade but also as a phase transition within a complex fluid. Suspended nanoparticles, microparticles, proteins, and colloidal components reorganise under enzymatic control to produce fibres, gels, and structured networks.

The familiar fibrin mesh of a clot is therefore not just the end point of a biochemical pathway. It is also the physical manifestation of a controlled transformation in the material state of blood. Could it be that what we are seeing in the blood reflects changes within a natural soft matter state?

Seen through this lens, the structures that appear in evaporating droplets of complex fluids — vesicles, fibres, particles, and crystalline compartments — begin to look less mysterious. They may represent different structural states emerging within a soft matter system as its environment changes.

Phase variation across environments

Placed side by side, these two images illustrate an intriguing possibility. Although the structures appear quite different, they may represent related material behaviour occurring under different local conditions. In soft matter systems, relatively small changes in environment—concentration, evaporation rate, dissolved components, or surface interactions—can produce very different structural outcomes.

What appears as geometric crystalline compartments in one preparation may therefore correspond, in another context, to vesicular or toroidal structures within a more fluid matrix. Rather than representing entirely different materials, these patterns may reflect phase variation within a common soft matter system responding to different environments.

A possible perspective on the white clots

This way of thinking may also offer a useful perspective when considering the white fibrous clots that have been widely discussed in recent years.

One possibility is that the underlying system we are observing represents a normal soft matter organisation within blood, in which particles, vesicles, fibres, and gels can form as part of natural phase transitions. Under certain circumstances, however, additional factors—whether biochemical, environmental, or material—may influence the way this system reorganises.

In such cases the structures that emerge could represent variations within an existing soft matter framework, rather than the appearance of an entirely new material.

The role of sessile droplet evaporation

A central method used throughout these observations is sessile droplet evaporation (SDE), a simple but powerful way of revealing structural organisation within complex fluids.

In this method a small droplet of fluid is placed on a microscope slide and allowed to evaporate naturally. As evaporation proceeds, internal flows and concentration gradients develop within the droplet. Dissolved components reorganise as the liquid volume decreases.

This process often produces striking internal organisation.

During SDE experiments I repeatedly observed sequences in which droplets evolved from apparently uniform fluids into complex internal landscapes containing vesicles, fibres, crystalline compartments, and toroidal structures.

Because these transformations occur over time, the process itself becomes an important part of the observation.

Recurring structural motifs

Across these preparations a number of recurring structural motifs appeared.

These include:

• square and rectangular crystalline compartments
• circular or toroidal inclusions within crystals
• vesicle-like domains forming during early droplet organisation
• fibres interacting with crystal boundaries
• distributed nucleation fields where many crystals form simultaneously

In some cases these elements interact, forming composite architectures in which fibres contact crystalline surfaces or vesicles cluster around developing crystals.

The atlas presents these images sequentially so that readers can follow the emergence of these patterns.

Observation before interpretation

My interpretation of these structures differs from many of the discussions currently circulating online.

Rather than beginning with assumptions about what these structures must represent, I focus first on their morphology and behaviour.

Sessile droplet evaporation provides a useful window into these processes because it allows structural transformations to be observed directly. Vesicle formation, particle aggregation, crystal nucleation, fibre emergence, and structural consolidation can often be seen as part of a continuous sequence.

The atlas documents these stages as they occur.

A visual record

The book contains 120 plates documenting structures observed across pharmaceutical preparations, biological samples, and experimental systems.

Some plates show sequential droplet evolution. Others present individual structures in greater detail, allowing their geometry and internal organisation to be examined.

Taken together, the images form a visual reference for recurring structural patterns that appear when complex fluids are examined closely.

An invitation to look

Microscopy remains one of the most powerful tools available for exploring the hidden architecture of the material world.

Sometimes the most productive first step is simply careful observation.

The atlas is offered in that spirit.

Readers are invited to examine the images, follow the sequences, and consider what processes might produce the structures shown.

All the best for your weekend and stay safe.

David

PS Thank you again to my supporters without which this would not be possible.

www.drdavidnixon.com

www.journalbnt.org (will be back up this week)

This week I have been working on my latest book:

I am pleased to say that the Atlas of Soft-Matter Structures is now nearing completion, although as always that depends slightly on what additional images or sequences I decide to include.

The atlas currently contains over 80 plates, drawn from a wide range of preparations—from Articaine to Zizi…

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Busy week here. I have been deep in the manuscript rewrite and, interestingly, the work has shifted in a way I did not fully anticipate.

What started life as a paper with a front and back bolted on is now clearly evolving into an atlas. The images, sequences, and recurring structures simply do not behave like isolated “results” — they sit much mo…

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