From Taylor Swift to Charli XCX, women had a record-breaking year on the British charts, according to new figures from the British Phonographic Institute (BPI).
Female pop artists topped the singles chart for an unprecedented 34 weeks – the highest ever figure.
Twenty-one of those weeks belonged to Sabrina Carpenter, whose hit singles Espresso, Taste and Please, Please, Please dominated the second half of the year.
Women were also responsible for half of the year’s biggest-selling albums, with Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department leading the pack.

With Antarctica’s climate warming at an unprecedented rate, scientists are battling with dangerously thin ice and equipment falling through into the sea beneath.

For 20 years, Simon Morley has been cutting holes in Antarctic sea ice and diving into the frigid waters below to study strange and colourful sea life – including sea squirts and sponges. But climate change is thinning out this ice, meaning it is often no longer safe enough to travel over.
“‘We’d get 100 or more dives through the sea ice in the winter period [in the past],” says Morley, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). “Last year, I think [my colleagues] managed maybe five to ten dives through the sea ice.”
The ice is creating a Catch-22 situation. “It’s too thick for them to get the boats out but it’s not thick enough to cut holes in with the chainsaw and actually do the diving,” he explains. A helpful way around this, however, is to keep boats ready and standing by during the winter, so that they can launch immediately when a window opens to use them, he says.

A Chinese court has sentenced two teenagers over the death of their classmate in March.
The teens in Hebei province, identified only by their surnames Zhang and Li, were 13 years old when they conspired to kill their classmate Wang and split his money between them.
After attacking Wang with a shovel, they buried him in an abandoned vegetable greenhouse, the court said in a statement on Monday, adding that their “methods were especially cruel and circumstances especially vile”.
The teenagers were sentenced to life imprisonment and 12 years imprisonment, respectively.