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"I always felt that for me as a woman, I always had to wait around," she told The New York Times in 2017. So, women would have to message first, and they'd have 24 hours to do it.

The app enjoyed early success in the mid-2010s and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then came the industry's tightening, the stock's sinking, and a widespread feeling of online dating malaise. While competitors like Hinge rose in the ranks, Bumble changed from a progressive darling to a stodgy also-ran.

On Tuesday, Bumble officially gave up on its founding principle. It allowed men to message first, a feature that had gradually loosened since the 2024 release of Opening Moves — a product overhaul that let men send the first "move" by replying to a prompt on a woman's Bumble profile. It also extended the countdown for messaging a new match from 24 hours to 72 hours.

Bumble argues that it isn't changing its principles. In a press release announcing the change, Wolfe Herd said that the move "isn't a departure from our founding vision, but rather an evolution of it." Bumble didn't respond to a request for comment.

But shedding the distinguishing feature of having women message first begs the question of how Bumble plans to differentiate itself from Tinder. Or any competitors.

Bumble's Tinderification

Wolfe Herd worked hard to differentiate Bumble at launch. While she avoided bashing Tinder — "I still hold equity in the company. It's my baby," she told Time in 2015 — she flexed Bumble's women-first approach and comparatively quick growth. She also sued Tinder, alleging sexual harassment, in a case that was later settled.

These days, though, Tinder and Bumble look almost identical.

Both are built on the basic swiping mechanism: right to match, left to skip. If two users swipe right, they chat and set up a date. That's a mechanism some users have expressed fatigue with.

What set Bumble apart, then, was its women-message-first ethos. The company chipped away at that with Opening Moves in 2024. Then, it tested a reversal earlier this year, making women the only first-movers once again in Australia and Mexico.

With Tuesday's shift, the company has abandoned the founding rule altogether.

Bumble and Tinder are sinking — Tinder even more so. The analytics firm Apptopia found that Tinder's daily active users declined 14.14% year-over-year, while Bumble's declined 9.22%. Match Group said in its second-quarter earnings that Tinder daily active users declined 4% year-over-year.

Tinder has a higher perch to fall from; it's the world's biggest dating app. Tinder is also part of Match Group, which includes the well-performing Hinge, helping shield the stock from some of the damage. Match Group's stock is up 16.08% so far this year; Bumble's is down 23.37%.

Bumble is trying to keep its women-first sheen.

"I have been recommitting myself as I returned as CEO, even more than ever before, to making Bumble better for women," Wolfe Herd wrote on Instagram in February.

Its Bumble BFF app — notably, not for dating — has been trumpeted as an answer to Gen Z women's friendship woes. The company has focused on rebranding the BFF app since Wolfe Herd returned.

But there are some signs that Bumble's namesake dating app is slipping among women. Time spent per daily female user has dropped for three straight months from the year earlier, plummeting 48% in July, Apptopia said. That measure rose for both Tinder and Hinge in May and June, the firm said.

Meanwhile, Bumble and Tinder's launches are starting to look the same. Both want to get you dating IRL. Both want to use AI to ease the experience (but not replace dating entirely).

One area where Bumble and Tinder most tightly compete: bad reviews. 72% of Bumble's new reviews are one star, the data analytics firm Appfigures found. That barely edges out Tinder, which Appfigures found had 71% new one-star reviews.

Throwing spaghetti at the wall

Bumble's big promise to investors is that a shiny AI makeover is imminent. A new app, a new experience.

However, investors (and users) are waiting with bated breath. Last August, Wolfe Herd told The Wall Street Journal that Bumble had plans to begin testing an early version of an AI dating app by the fall. She told investors in November that Bumble was eyeing a mid-2026 launch.

Spoiler: It didn't happen.

In May, Bumble pushed back the launch to the end of the year. By August, that was further delayed into 2027 due to a "data migration delay."

Following August's earnings call, Raymond James analyst Andrew Marok wrote that Bumble's delays are "leaving us with real doubts about the credibility of the Tech Stack 2.0 timeline and, by extension, the entire AI-relaunch narrative underwriting a re-acceleration."

Still, Bumble has a Hail Mary: killing the swipe. Wolfe Herd hyped up the company's forthcoming swipe-killer in May, calling it "revolutionary for the category."

What is it? We don't know. Wolfe Herd said that she wasn't disclosing the big bet "for competitive purposes."

Correction: August 11, 2026 — An earlier version of this story swapped attribution for metrics provided by Apptopia and Appfigures.

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Henry Chandonnet

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Henry Chandonnet is a senior reporter on the Business News desk. He writes about tech culture, from Silicon Valley's startup class to the everyday AI user. He also closely covers Big Tech and the workplace. Henry previously wrote for Fast Company, where he covered trending tech news. He's written for The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture.Email Henry at [email protected], reach him on Signal at henrychand.30, or follow him on X @HenryChandonnet. 

Sydney Bradley

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Sydney Bradley has been covering media and tech for Business Insider since 2020. She breaks news and writes extensively about Instagram and Facebook, as well as new social media startups, dating apps, the creator economy, venture capital, and tech culture.She regularly contributes to BI's "After Hours" series, where our reporters dive into the social scenes shaping tech, media, and finance.Sydney's reporting on Instagram was nominated as a finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Press Club National Entertainment Journalism Awards.She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in American Studies. You can follow Sydney's work on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram at @sydneykbradley.Have a tip? You can also contact her via encrypted messaging app Signal (@sydneykbradley.123), encrypted email ([email protected]), or standard email ([email protected]). Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• analysis

The key lies in rhodoliths: nodule-like calcareous structures formed by red algae that occur in oceans worldwide. The new approach turns a single nodule into a high-resolution climate archive that can track daily temperature swings as well as warming trends. Combining three-dimensional X-ray imaging with geochemical analyses and a special algorithm, the team reconstructed daily seawater temperatures from a single rhodolith collected in the central Red Sea.

Their findings are published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

An archive that was difficult to read

Typically, researchers reconstruct past climate conditions, for example on reefs, using the skeletons of corals, bivalves and microfossils such as foraminifera. However, these archives are increasingly constrained by shrinking habitats. Rhodoliths, by contrast, occur worldwide from shallow water to depths of about 200 meters (656 feet), making them a widely available archive.

The challenge has been their complex three-dimensional branching structure and asynchronous growth, which complicate the reconstruction of a clear, linear timeline within the layered calcareous skeleton. The team addressed this by combining several techniques.

First, the researchers stained the algae with a dye that specifically accumulates in calcium carbonate and left them to grow in the field for four months, using the stain as a time marker to measure how fast the branches grew. Then, they scanned the nodule using micro-computed tomography, an X-ray technique also used in medical CT scanners, to map its internal growth layers in three dimensions.

Next, they fired a laser along each branch to vaporize tiny bits of the algae's skeleton. A mass spectrometer then analyzed these bits to measure changes in the ratios of magnesium to strontium in each layer, allowing the researchers to determine the seawater temperature at the time each layer formed. Finally, the team applied a data-alignment algorithm known as dynamic time warping to merge data from multiple branches into a single, continuous timeline.

"Each branch captures only part of the record, and determining when each branch grew can be difficult," explained Lena Li, lead author and researcher at JGU and MPIC. "By mathematically aligning the growth of the branches, we can reconstruct a continuous, daily timeline from a single nodule."

Validation in the Red Sea

The researchers applied their method in the Red Sea, an extremely salty, nutrient-poor basin with high evaporation and intense sunlight. On its shallow reef flats, water temperatures range from about 18°C (64°F) to nearly 38°C (100°F) over the year. These conditions make a precise, high-frequency temperature record particularly valuable.

Using a single rhodolith from a central Red Sea reef flat, the team reconstructed 133 days of temperature data from March to July 2024. They then compared the results with measurements from temperature loggers at the site. The reconstruction closely matched the observed values, capturing both the seasonal warming trend and short-term variations.

Beyond rhodoliths

The study is a proof of concept that could be extended to rhodoliths worldwide. "In principle, the alignment technique could also be applied to other fragmentary records, such as several coral cores from a single reef or temporally overlapping records from different organisms, to combine them into a single continuous record spanning longer intervals," Li concludes.

In the future, this approach could also be applied to rhodoliths from other locations. This would enable the collection of high-resolution climate data across larger regions and longer time periods. Ultimately, this would help reconstruct paleoclimatic development and more accurately predict the impacts of global warming on threatened marine ecosystems.

The study was conducted by an international team from six institutions: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Institute of Geosciences) and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, together with Kiel University / GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (Germany), the University of Barcelona (Spain), the University of Toronto (Canada) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia), where the rhodoliths were collected and imaged.

Publication details

Lena Y. Li et al, Rhodoliths can act as daily resolution paleotemperature archives in the Red Sea, Communications Earth & Environment (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03603-y

Who's behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →

Robert Egan

Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →

Citation: Reading daily ocean temperatures from red algae (2026, August 11) retrieved 12 August 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-08-daily-ocean-temperatures-red-algae.html

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The OMB memo cites an earlier opinion from the Justice Department. The DoJ said the 2022 law no longer applies because the current version of TikTok has American owners and relies on a different recommendation algorithm than the app that operated under ByteDance. "TikTok may be used on government devices," the OMB memo confirms.

The memo ends what's among the last vestiges of the TikTok bans. The app was banned from most federal government devices in 2022 amid rising concerns about its parent company's ties to China. Government officials under then-President Joe Biden, including FBI Director Chris Wray, said the app posed a national security threat, though the exact nature of the risk was the subject of intense debate.

Intelligence officials never publicly disclosed specifics about the threat posed by TikTok, but lawmakers cited the app's data collection practices, and raised questions about whether the app's recommendation algorithm could be subject to influence from the Chinese government.

The app briefly went dark in the US last year after President Biden passed a law requiring ByteDance to sell the app to American owners or face a ban. The app came back online as Trump took office, and a deal to spin off the US version of the app was finalized earlier this year. The US version of the app is now controlled by an entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which is controlled by a group of investors that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and others. ByteDance maintains a 19.9 percent stake in the company.

Some federal agencies have already begun posting on TikTok from official accounts. The Department of Transportation, Treasury Department and Health and Human Services all started new accounts last month after the Justice Department opinion. The White House opened an official account last year. %!s()

Speaking to PC Gamer, Evergreen explains that both him and other developers who have done a lot of work on immersive sims "have a belief that the immersive sims that are being created today and are slated for the future are, by and large, thinking of themselves as [existing] in an arms race to be bigger and better." He notes how these games are trying to compete against much bigger names, saying that imsims have "to be triple-A, and it's got to sit right alongside Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, and it's got to be a game that's big enough to capture the public's attention. But I think that might be a misread for the audience size of immersive sims."

From Evergreen's perspective, as well as other imsim designers, he says, it's probably better to take the triple-I or double-A approach over chasing that triple-A money. "So you're talking about a $3-10 million budget, a passionate team led by some of us folks who have experience with immersive sims or newcomers who just played a lot of immersive sims and really get it, making something that's a little bit smaller, more passionate, and can be made more quickly," he suggests.

The developer notes how the original Thief had a budget of $3 million, or roughly $6 million adjusted for inflation, and that he isn't entirely sure that a game with that kind of budget "that you want to make in the year 2026 is going to sell disproportionately different amounts of copies than the $250 million one that comes out of a big studio. So I think that's an example of where the market is going, or [where] I think it should go at least."

I find myself agreeing with Evergreen, in part because of how the film industry used to be. These days it's all blockbusters that half the time don't make their multi-hundred dollar budgets back, when there was once a time where you'd get mid-budget films that served a particular niche and existed for the sake of having a broader portfolio (and would sometimes find success in DVD sales if they didn't in the box office, though that's harder to replicate in the games industry). There's a value in having niche, mid-budget games that appeal to a specific market that won't force a studio to close just because they weren't a number one bestseller. But what do I know! Surely the latest online gunslop will be a hit, just like the others. %!s()

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years (about 940 quadrillion miles) from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.

The new composite image contains X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has repeatedly observed the Tarantula Nebula over the course of its mission, in the blue layer. The X-ray data reveals gas blown away by winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, like sonic booms from supersonic jets.

The red represents infrared data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of young stars, plus swaths of cool dust that will provide the ingredients to form new stars and planets. Optical data in the green layer from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovers hydrogen gas that is warmer than that seen with Webb, as well as some individual stars through the nebula.

A puzzle in the missing X-rays

The composite image shows the full Hubble and Webb images of this region, as well as a large section of the Chandra image, all recently published in a research paper in The Astrophysical Journal. In some regions, the blue Chandra layer stands alone, and in others, it combines with either the red Webb data or the green Hubble data. In the middle region, all three images overlap to provide a holistic view in red, orange, yellow, green and blue.

Previously, astronomers had studied the amount and impact of energy produced by winds from young, massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. Scientists expect that much of this energy should heat gas so that it produces X-rays. However, the research paper shows that there is much less X-ray-emitting gas in the nebula than expected. This led researchers to ask: Where has this energy gone, and what tamed the Tarantula Nebula?

Three ways the nebula cools

By studying data from Chandra, Hubble and Webb, combined with data from NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the team concluded that the Tarantula may be losing energy from several sources.

First, up to half of the hot gas is leaking through the shell walls of the gas and dust structures and escaping the nebula. Next, there is stirring and mixing between the cold gas near the shell walls and some of the hot gas, lowering the overall temperature of the gas.

Finally, comparisons with computer simulations suggest the Tarantula may be losing energy through conduction. This involves direct physical contact between hot and cooler material, as with a frying pan on a burner, causing the materials to equalize in temperature.

In the case of the Tarantula Nebula, the hot gas would be conducting heat by being in direct contact with the cooler gas in the shells, especially in the densest regions. This scenario does not necessarily involve mixing the hot and cooler gas.

The combination of these three channels for losing large amounts of energy leads to this colorful and complex display revealed by NASA's telescopes working together.

Publication details

Jennifer A. Rodriguez et al, Taming the Tarantula: How Stellar Wind Feedback Shapes Gas and Dust in 30 Doradus, The Astrophysical Journal (2026). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae3c7a

Who's behind this story?

Lisa Lock

BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator. Editing for Science X since 2021. Full profile →

Robert Egan

Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →

Citation: Three energy-loss routes may explain Tarantula Nebula's X-ray shortfall (2026, August 11) retrieved 12 August 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-08-energy-loss-routes-tarantula-nebula.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. %!s()