The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
And here you've got a case where actually, some of the output neurons that we didn't think had any business being directly sensitive to light were actually making this photopigment, absorbing light, and converting that to neural signals and sending it to the brain.
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Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
And the thing that's really peculiar about this pigment, is that it's in the wrong place in a sense. When you think about the structure of the retina, you think about a layer cake essentially. You've got this thin membrane at the back of your eye, but it's actually a stack of thin layers and the outermost of those layers is where these photoreceptors you were talking about earlier are sitting. [...] But it turns out that this last photopigment is in the other end of the retina, the innermost part of the retina, that's where the so-called ganglion cells are.
So this last pigment is a really peculiar one. One can think about it as really the initial sensitive element in a system that's designed to tell your brain about how bright things are in your world.