There's a 39-year-old clerk who works at the marriage registry for the city of Wuhan, in China . . . her name is Xiong Ling.  (Her first name is pronounced She-ong.  The city of Wuhan is 525 miles west of Shanghai.)

And over the last nine years, Xiong has helped 30,000 couples file paperwork to get married . . . but she's also tricked at least 500 couples into STAYING married.    

When couples come to her office to file for divorce, Xiong sometimes pretends to be incompetent . . . she'll tell them that the printer is broken, or the network is down.      

Then she apologizes for the technical difficulties and tells people to come back on another day. 

And after she tricks people into taking more time to think about it, some couples reconsider and decide to give the marriage one more try.

(South China Morning Post)

18-year-old Eesha Khare of Saratoga, California won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award on Friday, at Intel's International Science Fair. (Saratoga is 13 miles southwest of San Jose.)

The award comes with $50,000 in prize money . . . and Eesha won it for something she invented because she was sick of her cell phone dying all the time.    

She designed and built something called a supercapacitor . . . which is an energy storage device.  Basically, it's a new kind of battery.  Instead of taking hours to fully charge your phone, Eesha's invention can do it in 20 or 30 seconds.    

It ALSO lasts 10 times longer than normal cell phone batteries.  And it can be recharged up to 10,000 times . . . compared to 1,000 times like most current rechargeable batteries. 

(NBCNews.com)

 In the late 1990s, a teenager in Albuquerque, New Mexico took his date to a French restaurant called La Café Miche for a romantic Valentine's Day dinner.  (The kid's name wasn't given.)

When the check arrived, the guy's date went to the bathroom.  And while she was gone, he confessed to the chef that he was about $40 short.    

The restaurant's chef was a guy named Claus Hjortkjaer (Hee-yorch-shier).  And he gave the kid $40 out of his own pocket to save him from being embarrassed in front of his date.  He told him to just pay it back when he had the chance.     

It took a while . . . but after 15 YEARS, the kid has FINALLY paid off the debt.  He brought Claus a $100 bill to cover the $40 loan . . . plus interest.

(KOAT.com)