Patreon has continued on its crusade against algorithmic feeds with its latest State of Create report, a look at trends in the creator economy based on internal data, and it’s an effort creators can get behind. In its survey of 1,000 creators and 2,000 fans, the membership platform reported that 53% of creators think it […]

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The GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 are both very fast graphics cards—if you can look past the possibility that we may have yet another power-connector-related overheating problem on our hands. But the vast majority of people (including you, discerning and tech-savvy Ars Technica reader) won't be spending $1,000 or $2,000 (or $2,750 or whatever) on a new graphics card this generation.

No, statistically, you (like most people) will probably end up buying one of the more affordable midrange Nvidia or AMD cards, GPUs that are all slated to begin shipping later this month or early in March.

There has been a spate of announcements on that front this week. Nvidia announced yesterday that the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which the company previously introduced at CES, would be available starting on February 20 for $749 and up. The new GPU, like the RTX 5080, looks like a relatively modest upgrade from last year's RTX 4070 Ti Super. But it ought to at least flirt with affordability for people who are looking to get natively rendered 4K without automatically needing to enable DLSS upscaling to get playable frame rates.

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Lisa Shah started telling people she wanted to be a doctor at age 6. She went straight from premed to medical school to her residency at the University of Chicago. But as much as she loved caring for patients, after connecting with dozens each day she "would come home feeling really emotionally drained," she says. Losing patients also deeply affected her.

Now, Shah works as the first chief medical officer at Twin Health, a startup that uses wearables and AI to monitor people's metabolism and prevent and treat conditions like diabetes and obesity. Far from the hospital, in her new role overseeing the company's clinical operations and innovation, she's working to treat "not just one person at a time, but populations at a time," she says.

Healthcare companies have long employed chief medical officers or chief health officers to oversee clinical settings. But in the wake of the pandemic and amid a booming health tech market, health tech companies — and even tech giants like Google and Salesforce — have been adding the CMO role to their ranks, and poaching physicians from hospitals in the process.

"We're seeing a lot of chief medical officers coming on board to grant that clinical, medical legitimacy to whatever products people are developing," says Chris Myers, an associate professor of management and medicine at Johns Hopkins University. The rise of CMOs, he adds, is "capitalizing on — if not feeding on — the trend that we're seeing more and more MDs looking for nonclinical jobs."

The COVID-19 pandemic left doctors overworked, underappreciated, and constantly exposed to new workplace hazards. The World Health Organization estimated that tens of thousands of health workers died globally in 2020 and 2021. A study published in the JAMA Health Forum found the proportion of clinicians looking to leave their roles jumped from 30% in 2019 to more than 40% in 2021. A 2022 survey from the consulting firm Bain & Company found that one in four clinicians were considering a career switch, many due to burnout. Today's physicians have been "pushed," says Myers, "to think about different options." And one of the most compelling options is the booming digital health industry, which is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2032, growing by nearly 19% each year.

For many doctors, the sense they have a calling to medicine makes the near-decade of school, often hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and grueling on-call hours worth it. "No one gets into medicine to be an administrator," says Dr. Guy Maytal. But the starkly inequitable healthcare system at times left him feeling helpless. He says patients have told him they could afford medication or food — but not both. Eventually, he decided, "I could grumble on the sidelines or roll up my sleeves and do something about it." In 2023, after nearly two decades of practicing psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and then Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, Maytal joined Forge Health, a startup that offers mental health and substance use treatments in-person and via telehealth. He says he now feels he has a much broader impact and ability to influence change at a quicker pace than he could when he was seeing patients.

The CMO role has expanded and evolved as the health tech industry has come under more scrutiny. Theranos, the cautionary tale of the biotech world, had a board that lacked medical expertise. A dermatologist who had treated Theranos' president, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, was hired as the company's lab director in 2014. He had no board certification related to pathology or laboratory science. Only after The Wall Street Journal exposed flaws in the validity of the company's blood-testing method in 2015 did the company create a medical and scientific advisory board. A company that wants to build trust, and avoid becoming another Theranos, "might certainly consider hiring a CMO to give a trusted voice to their product," Myers tells me. "People trust their doctors to have their best interest in mind" over a CEO.

It's hard to quantify the rise of the CMO. Major medical associations in the US told me they don't have data on the number of people working in these positions. But Data from ZipRecruiter found the number of job postings seeking chief medical officers jumped from 767 in 2019 to more than 5,000 in 2021. In 2024, there were 2,154 such job posts. In 2022, Emory University began offering a first-of-its-kind executive program to train chief medical officers for leadership positions in healthcare.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffery, the chief of health care affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, says that people rarely leave medical school to directly take on administrative work but slowly add those tasks throughout their career before making the switch. For the most part, doctors aren't jumping from the ER to startups; the decision to use their medical expertise for work other than seeing patients happens gradually.

Because it's still relatively new, the CMO remains an amorphous role, bending to meet the needs of an app and its users or a company's workforce. They might work on product development, research consumer safety, or analyze employee benefits and policies. In some cases, they're often balancing the business objectives of a startup with the Hippocratic oath they've taken to support patients.

Salesforce added a CMO in 2019, whose role focused on employee well-being. Google hired its first chief health officer in 2019. These are jobs that don't always focus on patients or a product; they might involve deciding which benefits companies offer to their employees or implementing ways to protect employees' health. "Companies are trying to take ownership more and more of employee health and well-being," says Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human capital management at New York University. With ever-growing healthcare costs, there could be more demand for health tech and healthcare coaching as part of employee benefits packages or for medical experts who can advise companies on the best tech tools to use for preventive care and mental health treatment.

Dr. Joshua Sclar serves as the chief clinical and public health advisor at Uber Health, a division of the ride-hailing giant that transports people to doctor's appointments and delivers medicine or groceries. "Being a physician, I know what happens when that care is missed," not just to a patient, but to the healthcare system as whole, Sclar says of his role in translating healthcare needs to the transportation company. Sclar previously worked in three other CMO roles and was the first hired at each. At Uber Health, Sclar says he was surprised to learn how complex the technology behind the app was, given how seamlessly ride-hailing apps appear to consumers. Other CMOs agree that there's a learning curve when moving from the medical world to the business world. Maytal says his new role has him translating medical jargon and learning business jargon. "It's my first time in my professional life where my boss wasn't a doctor," he says.

Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, the chief medical officer at the online therapy company TalkSpace — and formerly the chief of psychiatry at a psychiatric center — has had similar experiences. As her role as CMO has shifted, "oftentimes, it was me sitting in the room as the only mental health clinician thinking really critically about how I communicate my unique perspective in this room with all these business folks," she says. "There can be really different end goals when you're talking about business objectives versus healthcare objectives." Sclar believes many healthcare companies could benefit from bringing physicians into leadership roles. Those on the business side might know how to scale a company, but physicians give insight into whether the product will "translate to the impact on health that we want."

Despite these challenges, for physicians accustomed to sleeping next to phones while on call and spending hours fighting insurance companies after seeing sick patients, moving from the ER to the C-suite can take less of an emotional toll. "They're busy, they're hectic, they seem very stressful, but they're not life and death," Jaffery says of the issues that often arise in administrative positions. The average salary for a CMO across the US is about $275,000, according to ZipRecruiter data — comparable with the average doctor's salary, but with more humane hours.

The rise in CMOs comes as America faces a dire shortage of physicians. The Association of American Medical Colleges said the US is on track to be short 86,000 physicians by 2036, as a large number of doctors near retirement age and the demand for care grows. But the lure of the CMO role doesn't necessarily mean exacerbating the shortage — at least that's the hope among the CMOs I spoke to. "I don't think it's a zero-sum game," says Maytal. Many health tech startups are aimed at shortening wait times in hospitals and clinics or bringing primary care to underserved regions and underserved groups who are more prone to end up in emergency rooms with illnesses that could have been treated.

Like Shah, Dr. Nate Favini, who started as his company's first CMO last year, sees his role as "doctoring at a larger scale." The company, Pair Team, is a San Francisco-based digital health startup that uses AI to connect Medicaid patients to care. After watching his dad work in emergency medicine in rural Pennsylvania, he entered the field "knowing the healthcare system was broken," he says. "I knew I wanted to have a higher-level impact on the system." When he made the transition to health tech from caring for primarily Medicare patients, some colleagues thought he was crazy or selling out, he says. Now, more are coming around. "There's a massive opportunity to harness technology to deliver better care at a fraction of the cost and get really good care to everyone," Favini tells me. In the new age of medicine, the call to be a doctor may increasingly come from the tech world.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

AMD announced its fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, and the numbers were mostly rosy: $7.7 billion in revenue and a 51 percent profit margin, compared to $6.2 billion and 47 percent a year ago. The biggest winner was the data center division, which made $3.9 billion thanks to Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, and Ryzen CPUs are also selling well, helping the company's client segment earn $2.3 billion.

But if you were looking for a dark spot, you'd find it in the company's gaming division, which earned a relatively small $563 million, down 59 percent from a year ago. AMD's Lisa Su blamed this on both dedicated graphics card sales and sales from the company's "semi-custom" chips (that is, the ones created specifically for game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation).

Other data sources suggest that the response from GPU buyers to AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series, launched between late 2022 and early 2024, has been lackluster. The Steam Hardware Survey, a noisy but broadly useful barometer for GPU market share, shows no RX 7000-series models in the top 50; only two of the GPUs (the 7900 XTX and 7700 XT) are used in enough gaming PCs to be mentioned on the list at all, with the others all getting lumped into the "other" category. Jon Peddie Research recently estimated that AMD was selling roughly one dedicated GPU for every seven or eight sold by Nvidia.

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The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.

According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckman—founder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)—and Valerie Lau Beckman—an attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wife—were charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.

If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.

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• Dr. Dhivya Srinivasa is a double-board-certified surgeon who runs a private practice in California.
• Srinivasa had three kids while pursuing her medical career and is glad she didn't delay motherhood.
• She shares how she manages her busy schedule by prioritizing specific events with her kids.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dr. Dhivya Srinivasa, a California-based breast reconstruction surgeon. Business Insider verified her employment with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Some moms are at every PTA meeting, class party, and basketball game. Then, they're cooking dinner when their kids arrive home. You won't find me doing all of that — and it doesn't mean I love my kids any less.

I grew up with a physician as a mom. She had me and my siblings during her residencies. When I was born in India, my dad told my mom she didn't have to give up her career and they would make it work.

I grew up with strong examples of working parents and I hope to pass this on to my children. You can balance a career with parenting and what being an involved parent can look like is evolving.

I often felt misunderstood as a parent in my working environment

When I became pregnant during my fourth year of residency in 2013, I remember not wanting to tell anyone. I was the only female in my class.

I was a hard worker and supervising physicians' favorite, but I felt like things shifted when I got pregnant.

One time during residency, I remember being in a long surgery that was going past the scheduled end time. I let my attending physician know I needed to leave for a prenatal appointment, which was common practice for health-related appointments.

He said, "Sometimes I feel like you book them early on purpose." He had two kids of his own and should have known there weren't ever later appointments.

I had my first child in 2014 while working as a medical resident, and I was back at work four weeks after a difficult c-section, often pushing through 80 to 100-hour workweeks with an infant at home. Luckily, I had a nanny and my in-laws supporting me, and I completed my residency.

I had my second child in 2016 while completing a fellowship in plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Michigan from 2015 through 2018.

After having my third child in 2020, I started working on faculty at a hospital in L.A. Some doctors I worked with didn't acknowledge I'd just had a baby. I'd pump in my car as there was no lactation area in the hospital. I felt my colleagues doubted my ability, but I made it clear being a mom only made me a better surgeon.

I'm now a double board-certified plastic surgeon and run my own business for breast reconstruction.

Learning how to succeed at both

I started my private practice in September 2021. Now, I can be a physician and mother on my terms.

I had kids early in my career on purpose. My kids are now five, eight, and 10. I didn't want to wait and compromise my fertility for my career. I knew I could succeed at both, but it meant making sacrifices.

I had to learn where my energy was best directed. I used to prioritize pick-up until realized my kids didn't really care about that. But, I value their education, so I do their homework with them every night.

I've also learned to be proactive when selecting which of my children's events I can attend. When I first started my practice, I didn't block my schedule for certain school events. After my oldest child shared with me that he missed having me at these events, I started proactively blocking out time for my children — even if it meant requesting classroom activities from teachers at the start of the school year.

Now, I always take off Halloween for classroom parties and second-semester field trips. In the office, We've established color codes on my calendar so they're aware when a calendar event is non-negotiable and dedicated to my children.

As my kids get older, I make those decisions with input from my kids about what events are most meaningful to them. I cancel work for one on-campus activity per kid a year. On those days, we go all out. It isn't just a stop by the school for a few minutes, we dress up and plan our activities weeks in advance.

Their excitement, and mine as well, have shown me it isn't the number of events you're at as a parent, but your presence at the ones you can come to.

I've sacrificed at work too. I moved to running my practice versus the world of medical academia. In opening my practice, I had to make the tough decision to stop working with trainees. Though I love teaching, it slows down cases and I had to prioritize my family.

It does take a village — and it makes my kids well-rounded people

My husband Ravi is an interventional radiologist and professor. He is the parent the school calls if a kid needs to be picked up because I'm sometimes in surgery. While he also works full time, he's easier to reach due to set office hours and less time in the operating room.

We also talk to teachers at the beginning of the year about our setup so they know I won't be available at the last minute. I love that they learn that dads might be the first point of contact, not just moms.

My kids spend almost every weekend with their grandparents and sometimes weekday evenings. They are getting a rich education by spending time with their first-generation immigrant grandparents and have learned things I'd never be able to teach them. This assuages any guilt I have about my schedule.

Similarly, I have precious videos of my husband at the park with my kid, which he'd send to me while I was working.

These sweet moments are made sweeter as they show that my kids have so many different people who love them.

Nvidia is widely expected to announce specs, pricing, and availability information for the first few cards in the new RTX 50 series at its CES keynote later today. AMD isn't ready to get as specific about its next-generation graphics lineup yet, but the company shared a few morsels today about its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture and its 9000-series graphics cards.

AMD mentioned that RDNA 4 cards were on track to launch in early 2025 during a recent earnings call, acknowledging that shipments of current-generation RX 7000-series cards were already slowing down. CEO Lisa Su said then that the architecture would include "significantly higher ray-tracing performance" as well as "new AI capabilities."

The preview the company is providing today provides few details beyond those surface-level proclamations. The compute units will be "optimized," AI compute will be "supercharged," ray-tracing will be "improved," and media encoding quality will be "better," but AMD isn't providing hard numbers for anything at this point. The RDNA 4 launch will begin with the Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 at some point in Q1 of 2025, and AMD will provide more information "later in the quarter."

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• Hannah Witton, a sex education YouTuber, quit her popular channel a year ago.
• She cited burnout and becoming a mother as reasons for her shift.
• She now helps creators navigate career changes, focusing on those who have hit a content wall.

Last December, Hannah Witton decided 12 years with her enormously popular YouTube channel, where she became a beacon of knowledge for sex education, was enough.

Now, she wants to be the crisis clinic for struggling creators, using her 12 years of experience to help other YouTubers figure out their next steps.

Witton stepped away from her channel with over a decade's worth of content on sexual health, with a particular focus on sexuality with a disability.

Witton was one of a wave of long-standing YouTubers who left the channels on which they built their businesses over the past year, including MatPat of The Game Theorists and Tom Scott, who ended his famed "Things You Might Not Know" series.

They all did so for different reasons, but burnout and a sense they had hit a wall was a common thread in their decisions.

Witton told Business Insider that having a baby was the biggest factor for her. She had been on the content hamster wheel for so long, beholden to the ever-changing YouTube algorithm, that she didn't realize she was running on empty.

But being raised a feminist, she previously thought becoming a mom wouldn't change her career at all.

"Then when it actually happens, it's like, oh, wait, it's totally normal for this to completely rewire you," she told BI. "Not just physically and mentally, but actually logistically — your circumstances changing and the impact it has on your time, your energy, your resources, and all of that."

So, Hannah retired her channel and her Doing It Podcast, unsure of exactly what was next, but certain of one thing: she was taking a break.

"I was like, oh, I don't have to do that anymore," she said. "It was a risk I was willing to take."

One year after retirement

Witton started making content in 2013 and evolved as a dominant voice in the sex and relationships space, with a particular focus on enjoying sexuality while living with a chronic condition.

Witton herself has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic autoimmune illness where her digestive system gets regularly inflamed and has a stoma bag — an external pouch that takes on the role of the colon.

One year on from retirement, Witton has leaned into her Patreon. She has a second YouTube channel which she uploads to occasionally and when she feels like it, but it's not a priority in terms of income and career moves.

"Growth isn't one of my main goals at the moment," Witton said. "I'm really judging the success of videos on my enjoyment of it, and then the comment section, and just if other people enjoyed it too."

Witton said her finances did take a hit initially, but in the long term, it worked out. Struggling to keep up with the content mill meant Witton was draining her bank account by hiring freelancers and paying her team.

"I did cut down on a lot of my overheads at the end of last year because, of course, I also removed a big part of my income," Witton said. "But for the most part, I have been a lot financially healthier this year."

The YouTuber crisis clinic

After retirement, Witton organically started having conversations with many other creators about what they wanted to do next. This turned into a business in itself.

"I originally went in being like, I'm going to be a project manager," Witton said. "But it's more that I come in as a consultant or a coach, and then the rest is kind of up to them to execute."

For example, Witton coached a pregnant creator for a few months before her maternity leave, helping her figure out her priorities and what kind of schedule she could realistically keep.

Helping creators launch their Patreon pages is a big part of this process, Witton said, as she's been on there for 10 years and knows how it works inside out.

"It's been really fun and rewarding to use all of this insight and knowledge and experience that I have," Witton said. "It's reassuring for me as well that I do know stuff. I haven't just been talking to a camera — I've been building up all of these skills."

While Witton sees the value she could bring to newer creators, she finds working with more established ones more interesting.

"I want the creator who's going through a crisis," she said. "I want the creator who's been doing it six years and is like, what am I doing in my life?"

That's what gets her excited, she said — helping creators who are burned out, stressed, and confused about the future figure out their next steps.

"A lot of creators are getting to the age where they may be having children or different life responsibilities, or just generally having a different pace of life," Witton said. "It's the life cycle of a creator."

It's hard to turn off the creator voice in her head that tells her she should be doing more, so Witton has to listen to her own advice and not let the hamster wheel take her away again.

She would like a silver play button for her second channel one day, but right now, her priority is creators in need.

"The clinic is open," Witton said. "You can come to me when you're having your existential crisis."

• When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he brought dozens of scientists with him.
• Astronomers, mathematicians, and naturalists spent three years studying the country.
• Napoleon's invasion failed, but it led to some groundbreaking scientific work.

It's been a year since Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" debuted. It earned three Oscar nominations, including for visual effects and costumes. The film had epic battles and sulky moments from Joaquin Phoenix, who portrayed the general.

However, the movie didn't cover much about Napoleon Bonaparte's interest in science, which had a profound impact on France's intellectual pursuits following his reign.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in July 1798, he brought more than just tens of thousands of soldiers. He also recruited over 150 scientists, known as savants, to accompany him.

They arrived "with the aim of both study and exploitation," according to one archaeologist.

A little over a month later, on August 23, 1798, the scientific society called the Institut d'Égypte, which still exists today, held its inaugural meeting in a lavish palace in Cairo and appointed Napoleon as its first vice president.

Napoleon wanted to use the country's natural resources, history, and culture for France's benefit. He urged the savants to focus on projects like improving bread ovens, purifying the Nile's water, and brewing beer without hops.

The scientists' tasks were made more difficult because the ship carrying much of their surveying and scientific equipment had sunk. Then, after a series of defeats in Egypt, Napoleon returned to France in 1799 and left many of the scientists stranded.

Despite setbacks, the engineers, mathematicians, naturalists, and others spent nearly three years surveying, documenting, and collecting everything from antiquities to mummified remains to animals largely unknown to the West.

Their work led to some novel discoveries, helped formalize sciences like archaeology, and spurred an infatuation with Egypt that's continued ever since.

1. The discovery that chemical reactions are reversible

Before chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet's realization, the concept that chemical reactions could be reversible wasn't universally accepted.

However, Berthollet found strong evidence to support the idea while studying the salt deposits in the lakes of the Natron Valley.

Natron, a naturally occurring salt, covered the limestone in the lakes. Ancient Egyptians had used the substance to preserve mummified bodies because it absorbed moisture and dissolved fat.

Berthollet observed that the limestone, which contained calcium carbonate, chemically reacted with salt, aka sodium chloride, to produce natron, made of sodium carbonate.

In laboratory conditions, chemists knew that the exact opposite reaction was possible, which led Berthollet to reasonably conclude that chemical reactions were reversible and that heat and different amounts of a substance could determine which way the reaction went.

2. A more formal approach to archaeology

In Napoleon's time, archaeology wasn't yet a formal science. Most savants had little experience with artifacts. Sand still buried some temples that had yet to be excavated.

Dominique-Vivant Denon, an artist and writer, was awed by the ancient monuments he saw. He went back to France with Napoleon and quickly published a book with his descriptions and drawings, "Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt."

At the time of Napoleon's invasion, travelers had long known of Alexandria, Cairo, and other parts of Lower Egypt. The Great Pyramids and Sphinx were famous. But Upper Egypt wasn't as well known.

That changed when the savants arrived. "The whole army, suddenly and with one accord, stood in amazement... and clapped their hands with delight," Denon later wrote.

His drawings and descriptions of the temples and ruins at Thebes, Esna, Edfu, and Karnak proved immensely popular. Many were depicted in fashionable paintings and inspired decor trends.

Since he'd had to capture everything in short bursts of time, Denon had pushed for two commissions of savants to return and better document the monuments.

Napoleon's architects and engineers made careful drawings and took measurements of a large number of monuments. Others attempted to measure the pyramids. (Napoleon never shot them with cannons, in case you were wondering.)

3. Savigny created a new way to classify insects

Just 21 and a botanist by training when he arrived in Egypt, Jules-César Savigny collected invertebrates like worms, bees, spiders, snails, and flies. He also took specimens of starfish, coral, and sea urchins.

When he was back in France, Savigny needed to organize the 1,500 species of insects he'd brought from Egypt. There didn't yet exist a systematic way to distinguish one species of moth or butterfly from another. So Savigny invented one.

Surprisingly, the bugs' mouth parts had sufficient differences to allow Savigny to separate them into species. He pored over the tiny jaws of the insects. He drew over 1,000 images of specimens, some of which were only a centimeter long.

Savigny applied the same rigor to arachnids, worms, and other animals that lacked backbones. Some of his classification methods are still in use today.

4. The discovery of a new species of crocodile that took 200 years to confirm

Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was convinced there were two species of crocodiles in the Nile.

Like Savigny, Geoffroy was a prolific collector. While in Egypt, he studied bats, mongooses, tortoises, and more.

One reason Geoffroy was able to dissect and stuff so many specimens was he had purchased an 11-year-old enslaved boy, whom he trained to help with his work.

Geoffroy closely examined so many different kinds of animals that he started to see patterns between even very different species. It led to his theory of a "unity of plan" or "unity of composition" a kind of quasi-evolutionary idea that Charles Darwin would reference decades later.

Geoffroy's theories often irritated his fellow naturalists. That includes when he attempted to demonstrate a mummified crocodile he'd taken from Egypt represented a separate species.

Its jaw was completely different from the Nile crocodile, Geoffroy said. Plus, it was less aggressive. One had even been on display in Paris. "It took pleasure in being patted; and anyone might, without the least danger, open its mouth, and place his hand between its teeth," according to one account.

His colleagues didn't believe him. However, over 200 years later, biologist Evon Hekkala and a team of researchers analyzed the DNA of modern crocodiles and some of Geoffroy's mummies to confirm his suspicions. Indeed, they showed two separate species swam in the Nile: Crocodylus niloticus and Crocodylus suchus.

5. The advent of ophthalmology

The French physicians who accompanied Napoleon encountered unfamiliar illnesses in Egpyt. One disease that traveled with them back to Europe was something they called Egyptian ophthalmia. Now known as trachoma, it can cause itchy, swollen eyes and lead to blindness.

It became so prevalent that physicians all over Europe started studying the disease. Geoffroy, who contracted it, was "totally blind" for weeks, he wrote.

Up to that point, ophthalmology wasn't a formalized branch of scientific research, but the race to find the origin of this disease laid the groundwork for its creation.

Eventually, British physician John Vetch realized the pus from an infected eye could spread the disease. Knowing it was contagious, Vetch developed methods of prevention and treatment that are considered milestones in the history of ophthalmology.

6. The Rosetta Stone helped Champollion decipher hieroglyphs

For centuries, no one could read hieroglyphs, the pictorial writing that covered many Egyptian monuments.

When the French found the Rosetta Stone during their invasion, they knew it could serve as a kind of translation key.

Deciphering hieroglyphs would allow scholars to read the writing on scores of other Ancient Egyptian texts and monuments.

In 1801, the British were negotiating for France's surrender. One stipulation was that the British would take the antiquities and the savants' collections, which included the Rosetta Stone.

Geoffroy told the British that the savants would "destroy our property, we will disperse it in the Libyan sands, or we will throw it into the sea" before they handed it over. They were allowed to keep their notes and collections. But not the slab.

Three texts were inscribed on the stone in Egyptian hieroglyphs, an Egyptian cursive script derived from hieroglyphs, and Ancient Greek. Since the three were identical, the Greek writing could help researchers decipher the hieroglyphs.

It took two decades for French scholar Jean-François Champollion to translate them. Champollion made use of a copy the French savants had taken of the slab and published.

The Rosetta Stone is currently in the British Museum. Egypt has been trying to get it back, calling it a "spoil of war."

7. The invention of an engraving machine that sped up the printing process

When the savants returned to France, many worked on compiling the multi-volume book "Description de l'Égypte," which amounted to 7,000 pages encompassing what they'd seen and studied in Egypt.

To save some of the laborious work of engraving, engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté created a machine that automated part of the process.

To print the hundreds of illustrations, engravers first had to transfer them to copper plates.

For plates with monuments, Conté's machine could engrave the sky in the background. The engraver could program it to create clouds as well.

What originally would've taken six to eight months could be completed in just a few days.

It was still a massive undertaking and considered to be the most ambitious work of France in the early 19th Century. The first volume wasn't printed until 1809. The final volume came out in the late 1820s, nearly a decade after Napoloen's death.

8. The science of geology flourished

Many savants were tasked with documenting the natural history of Egypt. Mining engineer François-Michel de Rozière had the difficult job of describing the country's rocks and minerals.

Decades before Napoleon's invasion, many naturalists started adopting Carl Linnaeus' two-word system for naming plants and animals. But rocks and minerals lacked a similar widely accepted language.

To accurately capture the nuances of the granite or shells he saw, Rozière painstakingly described their textures, layers, and colors. One description referenced "transparent quartz, yellowish feldspath, and black schist."

He also understood the importance of including illustrations of the rocks, which made them much easier for other savants to identify. In the Description de l'Egypte, his fifteen plates contained over 100 colorful illustrations of porphyry, basalt, and other rocks and fossils.

Though Napoleon didn't use the geological knowledge his savants gathered in Egypt, some argue that his invasion spurred the creation of military geology. Soon, scientists were surveying unfamiliar terrain during campaigns and using their knowledge for engineering projects.

9. An attempt to date Egyptian antiquity

In the midst of his work on the Rosetta Stone, Champollion decried the removal of another piece of Ancient Egyptian history from the country.

During a quick visit to the Dendera temple, Denon had sketched the ceiling, where Ancient Egyptians had carved zodiac signs, Egyptian constellations, and other figures into the stone. Other engineers made more detailed drawings of the intricate design.

In 1821, a French expedition dynamited part of the temple and took the zodiac ceiling to France. Champollion worried the removal of the zodiac would lead to the "complete destruction" of the rest of the ceiling and stripped the artifact of important context.

French scholars debated whether they could use depicted features like eclipses to date its creation. At the time, no one knew exactly how far back in time human history stretched. Some estimated the zodiac was older than 5,000 years BCE. Others suggested more recent dates such as 800 BCE. Champollion thought deciphering hieroglyphics would offer a more reliable dating method than an interpretation of the ancient sky.

More recent dating techniques put the Dendera zodiac at around 50 BCE, around Cleopatra's era. One researcher called it "the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky" from that era. It remains in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

This story was originally published on December 2, 2023, and most recently updated on November 14, 2024.