Your grandparents probably have a little round scar on their upper arm from the smallpox vaccine. Nobody gets that shot anymore, because 49 years ago this week the disease caught its last person in the wild, a 23-year-old cook who hopped in a stranger's car to give directions. His name was Ali Maow Maalin, and he worked in the kitchen at a hospital in Merca, Somalia. A driver pulled up one day looking for an isolation camp, with two sick kids in the back seat. Ali got in to point the way. He'd never been properly vaccinated, even though the hospital was supposed to cover all its staff, so that short ride was enough. About ten days later he came down with a fever. Doctors told him it was malaria, then chickenpox, and by the time anyone realized what he really had, the last wild smallpox on the planet had been walking around a port town for days. The eradication team tracked down every person he'd been near and vaccinated all of them. Nobody else got sick, including every patient he'd been cooking for. Then the world held its breath for two years. WHO put up a cash reward for anyone who could find one more case, and nobody ever did. In May 1980 they made it official, and smallpox became the first human disease ever wiped off the face of the earth. And this thing was enormous. Smallpox killed around 300 million people in the 1900s alone, more than both World Wars combined. 9/11 killed 2,977. In 1967, the year the final push started, smallpox killed about 2 million, which is like losing nearly two 9/11s every day, all year long, to one virus. The whole global campaign cost about $300 million over 12 years. The US earns back everything it put in every 26 days, just in vaccines it never has to give again. Wall Street would kill for that kind of return. Good news like this is easy to miss because it shows up as funerals that slowly stop happening, spread across years, in places most of us will never visit. Nobody pins a date on that. The records can't even agree whether Ali's rash appeared on October 26 or the 27th. Ali spent the rest of his life going door to door in Somalia, vaccinating kids against polio. He died of malaria in 2013, out in the middle of a polio campaign, still trying to help the world wipe out a second one.

People in Tokyo found $29 million in cash lying around last year and walked it to the police. That's a record, and it's the fourth year in a row they've set one. Japan figured out how to make that happen on purpose. It's also why an Apple store there can leave a brand new iPhone sitting loose on a table with a crowd of strangers all around it. The trick is that Japanese law pays you to be honest. Turn in a lost wallet and you're entitled to 5 to 20% of what it's worth when the owner picks it up. If nobody claims it within three months, the whole thing is yours. Of that ¥4.5 billion, about ¥3.2 billion made it back to the people who lost it. A law professor at Michigan, where I went to school, actually tested this back in 2003. Mark West dropped wallets and phones around Tokyo and New York on purpose and counted how many came back. In Tokyo, 80% of the wallets and 88% of the phones got turned in, while New York managed about 10% and 6%. West put most of it down to the law and the habits it drills into kids from a young age. Then there's the koban. Japan has around 6,000 of these tiny police boxes, so when you find something there's almost always one a short walk away. They hold the item for a month in case the owner comes back looking, then ship it to a central lost and found that logs everything into a database anyone can search. A New York City Council report back in 2007 basically called the city's version a dead end. My favorite stat is the umbrellas. Tokyo residents turned in 338,000 lost umbrellas in one year. About 1% ever got back to their owner, because who goes to the police over a $3 umbrella? People kept bringing them in anyway. And they leave money on the table all the time. Last year ¥700 million, roughly $4.5 million, went to the Tokyo government because the owner never showed up and the finder never came back to collect it. That's cash strangers could've legally pocketed, and they just never came back for it. West did point out the catch if you want to copy this. A lost and found this good eats up a ton of police time, and Japan can spare it because its murder rate is one of the lowest on earth. So that untethered iPhone is sitting on top of a law from 1882 and a police force with enough free time to chase down your wallet.