His sister gave him a kidney for his 49th birthday

Troy Rowe spent his 49th birthday at NYU Langone Health, where his older sister Kim donated him a kidney. The siblings walked in arm-in-arm on February 2 for a surgery that had been months in the making.

Troy was diagnosed in 2024 with declining kidney function, and by March 2025 nephrologist Lionel E. Desroches sent him straight to the emergency room. The diagnosis was end-stage kidney disease caused by hypertension. He began dialysis and started asking around for a donor. Troy has B positive blood, which is less common, so the odds were not generous.

Kim turned out to be a rare and highly compatible match. She cleared a battery of evaluations, including a colonoscopy, which is its own kind of love. When the surgery landed on Troy's birthday, the family took it as a sign.

"I've always looked after my baby brother," Kim said. Both have recovered well. The following month, they got together again to celebrate her birthday.

He sold his Dan Marino card for bills. She bought it back.

Lindsey Moore was seven years old when she watched her father walk into a comic book store and sell his 1984 Topps Dan Marino rookie card to help cover the family bills. She remembered it for more than thirty years. When she drew his name for Secret Santa, she went looking for the card and found one. Her father opened the gift while a family member read her note aloud. "Money was tight, so you were selling your most prized possession, at least I viewed it as that," Moore wrote. "I felt your sacrifice and it taught me that I would do whatever necessary to ensure my future family never needed anything." He started tearing up before he even saw what was inside. A mint-condition version of the card can sell for as much as $30,000. The TikTok of the moment went viral in 2023. One commenter put it plainly: the card was not the real gift.

California will send 400 diapers home with every newborn

California will send every newborn delivered at participating hospitals home with 400 diapers, about five weeks' worth, under a new program from Governor Gavin Newsom called Golden State Start. There is no income check and no enrollment form. Newborns go through eight to ten diapers a day, and diapers run about $100 a month, a bill that arrives before most parents have slept. The program runs through a partnership with the nonprofit Baby2Baby, which built its own manufacturing line to produce diapers at 80 percent below retail. Year one covers 65 to 75 hospitals and about a quarter of California births, with priority for facilities serving low-income patients. The state put $7.4 million toward it last year and has proposed $12.5 million more through June 2027. "The first days at home with a newborn should be focused on the love, connection, and joy of an expanded family, not stress about affording diapers," said state health secretary Kim Johnson.

The parrot who couldn't feed himself is now the alpha

Bruce, a kea parrot at New Zealand's Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, was found in 2013 as a chick with his upper beak broken off, an injury that should have made him unable to feed himself. Kea use their long curved beaks to preen, crack seeds, and tear into food. Bruce had none of that. So he invented a workaround. Researchers at the University of Auckland documented him picking up small pebbles, holding them between his tongue and lower beak, and using them to comb through his feathers. He is the first known parrot to use a tool for self-care. The behavior was not taught. Other kea at the reserve do not do it. Bruce figured it out alone, and over the years he has refined his technique, selecting stones of a particular size. He has also climbed the social ranks at the reserve. The bird who could not feed himself is now the alpha.

He turned 600 Rubik's Cubes into a full-time job.

Dylan Sadiq was 21 when he spent a few thousand dollars of his savings on 600 individually wrapped Rubik's Cubes, a purchase his mother found difficult to defend. Five years later, it is his full-time job. Sadiq, a biomedical engineering major at Rutgers University whose in-person classes were paused by the pandemic, had been solving cubes since he was 10 when he noticed they worked like pixels. He coded a program that converts any image into the six cube colors, then built a 560-cube portrait of Luka Dončić over 12 hours. He tagged the Dallas Mavericks. They reposted it. Now calling himself The College Cuber, he builds live mosaics at NBA Finals games and toy fairs, has more than 600,000 social media followers, and prefers portraits of people smiling. He still lives at home. His mother, he said, has come around, and also makes him dinner.