☕️ South Australia's election result

If anyone happens to run into (or swim into) Cameron McEvoy today, make sure you say congratulations.

Over the weekend, the Aussie swimmer broke the world record for the men’s 50 metres freestyle, with a time of 20.88. It’s the first time the record has been broken in 17 years!

His secret? He famously decided a few years ago to stop spending so much time in the pool. He went from training 30 kilometres in the pool per week, to just two. A strong win for the ‘work smarter, not harder’ crew.

The quote: “Freedom of navigation is a fundamental principle of international law, including under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The effects of Iran’s actions will be felt by people in all parts of the world, especially the most vulnerable.”
An excerpt from a joint statement issued by 22 nations, including Australia, calling on Iran to allow for commercial ships to have safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The stat: 74,397. The number of spectators who watched the Matildas’ 1-0 loss to Japan in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup final on Saturday night, setting a new match record for the tournament. The last time the tournament final was held in Australia was in 2006, when the Matildas lost to China in front of 5,168 fans.

The big question:

Yesterday’s results: 63% of you think you can ‘be yourself' at work. [1,950 votes].

Together with AAP.

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Labor has secured a second term in South Australia following a landslide victory on Saturday, with Premier Peter Malinauskas set to remain premier.

One Nation’s support also soared across the state, with the right-wing party securing a higher primary vote than the Liberals.

Here’s what you need to know.

At the 2022 state election, Labor secured a majority government with 27 seats, the Liberals won 16, and independents secured four.

Over the course of the term, the Liberals lost three seats due to resignations and changes of party, Labor gained two through by-election wins, and one seat had been vacant since September 2025.

At the time of publishing, Labor has increased its majority to 32 seats, the Liberals have won just 4 seats and One Nation has secured 1 seat.

On the night of the election, Premier Malinauskas said: “Although it is the best result our party has ever achieved, it’s very important that no one confuses tonight’s results as adulation… Instead, we should see it only as an invitation, an invitation to continue to work our guts out for the next four years.”

Meanwhile, One Nation is on track to record its best result in an election in nearly 30 years. It secured a primary vote total of 22% against the Liberals’ 19%. The last time One Nation attracted more than 20% of the vote in a statewide election was in Queensland in 1998.

🎧 On today’s TDA podcast, Lucy and Sam chat about the new AI system created with images from Pokémon GO.

⚽ Missing the Matildas already? You can sign up to TDA Sport here to make sure you get the Asian Cup recap this afternoon.

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Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon GO, has revealed it used nearly a decade of player data to train an AI navigation system capable of pinpointing locations within centimetres. Last week, the company announced that the technology would be used to help delivery robots navigate city streets.

The announcement has raised questions about the ethics of how the data was collected, including the nature of player consent. Here’s what you need to know.

Pokémon GO is an ‘augmented reality’ smartphone game developed by Niantic in partnership with Nintendo. Augmented reality games use a device’s camera and screen to layer graphics over the real world.

The game asks users to grant access to their precise location to find nearby Pokémon. Real-world locations such as statues and churches are PokéStops, where users can access in-game items. In the first 60 days after its 2016 launch, 500 million people downloaded Pokémon GO, and the game had 100 million active users across 2024.

In 2025, Niantic sold off the video-game arm of its company but retained the mapping data and technology for its AI spinoff, Niantic Spatial.

According to Bond University Associate Professor Dr James Birt, “Pokémon GO was really just a gamification layer for allowing Niantic... to essentially gather data of real-world locations”.

Every time a user scanned a landmark for in-game rewards, their phone was capturing photos, GPS coordinates, camera angles, and movement data.

This resulted in 30 billion images collected across thousands of cities in all weather conditions, at every time of day, and in every lighting condition – all feeding into a growing visual map of the world.

Niantic Spatial’s first commercial application is a partnership with a delivery robot startup called Coco Robotics. Niantic’s tech solves a core problem with GPS in cities, where tall buildings can interfere with satellite location data.

The delivery robots will be able to identify locations by matching camera footage against the database of real-world images, much of which was generated by Pokémon GO players.

All Pokémon GO users approved the collection and third-party use of their data by agreeing to the game’s terms of service. Niantic says it has used “player-contributed scans” to build a model of the world from its database of images.

“This scanning feature is completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location,” it says.

However, Dr Birt questioned whether players actually knew how their data would be used.

The practice of using user data for third-party applications is common in the tech industry. For example, Tesla collects data from drivers in its cars to train its autonomous systems.

“All of these systems that were given away for ‘free’,” Dr Birt says, “really were a data aggregate source.”

Reporting by Elliot Lawry.

March is Epilepsy Awareness Month – a time to better understand epilepsy and the different ways it can impact people’s lives  

One of those realities is drug-resistant epilepsy, which affects around one in three Australians living with epilepsy. This means seizure freedom isn’t achieved despite trying two appropriately chosen medications. Raising awareness is an important step toward greater understanding, empathy and improved care.

Resources are available at Drug Resistant Epilepsy - Epilepsy Action Australia, and LivaNova is supporting efforts to increase awareness and education around drug-resistant epilepsy. If this topic affects you or someone you know, information and support might make a difference.

Hawaiʻi Pacific University’s “Bounty Project” pays commercial fishers to recover nets, lines, and floats, pulling the gear from the water before it can damage reefs or threaten marine wildlife. In just over three years, the project has logged more than 690 recovery events. Much of the recovered netting has been recycled into roads or converted into electricity, while some has been set aside for further research.

Reporting by Emma Gillespie.

A possum has decided to join its family at Hobart Airport. Well, kind of.

According to The Guardian, a passenger was browsing the range of native animal plush toys in the gift shop when they discovered an actual possum. 

True to form, the marsupial had joined other Aussie animals, snuggling next to a Tasmanian devil and a kangaroo.

Reporting by Anju Dhanushkodi.