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Rihanna makes history in UK chart
Rihanna has set a new record as the first female solo artist in UK chart history to achieve number one singles in five consecutive years.
The Official Charts Company announced her record after What's My Name? rose from number two to the top spot.
The last solo artist to achieve the feat was Elvis Presley, who had number ones in each year from 1957 to 1963.
Rihanna's album Loud also holds on to its number one slot, giving her the second UK chart double of her career.

Loud has now sold nearly 900,000 copies since its release in November last year.

As well as her number one, Rihanna, who is 22 and from Barbados, also appears on two other songs in the top 10 - Only Girl (In The World) and Who's That Chick.

Only Girl (In The World) was a number one last year and followed other number ones for Run This Town (2009), Take A Bow (2008) and Umbrella (2007).

Other albums which have re-entered the top 10 are Plan B's The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Rumer's Seasons Of My Soul and Cee Lo Green's The Lady Killer which climbs to its highest chart position yet at number four.

In the singles chart, the BBC's Sound Of 2011 winner, Jessie J, climbs to number five from last week's 18 with Do It Like A Dude.

Scientists found no signs of cancer in their extensive study of mummies apart from one isolated case

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: 'In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.

'The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.'

To trace cancer's roots, Professor Zimmerman and colleague Rosalie David analysed possible references to the disease in classical literature and scrutinised signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies.

Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed.

This is despite experiments showing that tumours should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.

Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn't live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones died occur.

Fossil evidence of cancer is also sparse, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil, the journal Nature Reviews Cancer reports.

Even the study of thousands of Neanderthal bones has provided only one example of a possible cancer.

Caricaturist James Gillray illustrated the taking of snuff, which appears in first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours of nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761

Evidence of cancer in ancient Egyptian texts is also 'tenuous' with cancer-like problems more likely to have been caused by leprosy or even varicose veins.

The ancient Greeks were probably the first to define cancer as a specific disease and to distinguish between benign and malignant tumours.

But Manchester professors said it was unclear if this signalled a real rise in the disease, or just a greater medical knowledge.

The 17th century provides the first descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers.

And the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours only occurred in the past 200 years or so, including scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775 and nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761.

Professor David, who presented the findings to Professor Mike Richards, the UK's cancer tsar and other oncologists at a conference earlier this year, said: 'In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare.

'There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.

'The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.

'Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message – cancer is man-made and something that we can and should address.

Dr Rachel Thompson, of World Cancer Research Fund, said: 'This research makes for very interesting reading.

'About one in three people in the UK will get cancer so it is fairly commonplace in the modern world.

Scientists now say a healthy diet, regular physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight can prevent about a third of the most common cancers so perhaps our ancestors’ lifestyle reduced their risk from cancer.'

(CNN) -- A 19-year-old Nigerian undergraduate student has signed a two-novel deal with the British publisher Faber, making her its youngest ever woman author.

Chibundu Onuzo, a history student at King's College London, will have her first novel, "The Spider King's Daughter," published next year..

"I wrote the book in my last year at school," Onuzo told CNN. "I've been writing since I was 10, but this was the first novel I finished, so it was very liberating to be able to write 'The End.'"

Onuzo, who moved to England to go to school five years ago, found an agent before she had even finished writing, and sealed the book deal on her first meeting with a publisher

Her editor at Faber, Sarah Savitt, describes Onuzo as a "very talented writer at the beginning of an exciting writing career."

Onuzo is the latest of a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers -- many of them female -- who have made their mark in the literary world in the past few years.

They include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction for "Half of A Yellow Sun;" and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, published her first novel, "I Do Not Come To You By Chance," last year, which has also garnered several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Nigeria has a rich literary tradition spanning the 50 years since its independence, including one Nobel Prize for Literature, one Man Booker Prize winner, one Man Booker International Prize, one Orange Prize winner, and three winners of the Caine Prize for African Writing, which is often described as the "African Booker."

It is an impressive haul, even for Africa's most populous country with a population of 150 million, but according to those in the know, it is just the beginning.

Publishers and writers say there is an explosion of young Nigerian writers about to gain even more international recognition.

Jeremy Weate, a British man who set up Cassava Republic publishing company in Abuja in 2007 with his Nigerian wife Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, said: "This is a very exciting time and the best of Nigerian writing is still ahead.

"There is some awareness overseas of Nigerian authors and an increasing number of Nigerians winning awards, but we believe this is just the beginning.

"There is still a huge amount of undiscovered and up-and-coming talent in Nigeria."

Among the new wave of literary talent are Chika Unigwe, an Afro-Belgian author who writes in both Dutch and English published her first English novel "On Black Sisters' Street" in the UK last year. It was described by Alistair Campbell, press secretary to the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on Twitter as the "best novel so far read this summer."

Habila, who won the Caine Prize for his novel "Waiting for an Angel," told CNN: "My generation has been very fortunate. The return to democracy in [in Nigeria] the last 10 or 12 years has brought people more freedom to express themselves and to travel, and opportunities for publishing and writing workshops that have encouraged creativity. There was active suppression of these things until the late 1990s.

"There are going to be even more brilliant young writers coming through in the next few years. Whenever I go home I see the incredible enthusiasm and hunger of young writers. They have seen us succeed, so they know it's possible."

Unigwe, too, is optimistic about the future.

She told CNN: "For a long time we thought the western market was closed to African writers, so it was a huge thrill when we started to see them being published.

"I get lots of emails from young writers who want to get published and there's some really amazing stuff coming out. It gives me a lot of hope for the next few years."

Most successful writers have moved away from Nigeria, some leaving when they were very young. If writers of Nigerian parentage, born elsewhere, were counted the list of success stories would be even longer.

Lizzy Attree, expert in African literature and consultant to the Caine Prize for African Literature, said: "Nigeria has a rich literary tradition and at certain points it has come particularly to the world's attention.

"The first wave was in the 1960s after independence with writers like Chinua Achebe, and then a new wave has emerged in the last few years with the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Some second and third generation Nigerians in the West have also made links back home and brought their stories to a younger generation."

Or, as Onuzo puts it simply: "There's something in the water in Nigeria. I guess we just have a lot of interesting stories to tell."