GM This article is more than 10 years oldMonsanto sued small farmers to protect seed patents – reportThis article is more than 10 years oldAgrobusiness has won $23m from its targets, but one case is being heard at supreme court this month The agricultural giant Monsanto has sued hundreds of small farmers in the United States in recent years in attempts to protect its patent rights on genetically engineered seeds that it produces and sells, a new report said on Tuesday.

Star TrekObituaryNichelle Nichols obituaryActor who blazed a trail for black women on American TV in the 1960s in the role of Lt Uhura in Star TrekThe actor and singer Nichelle Nichols, who has died aged 89, was one of the first black women to be featured on American television in a non-subservient role when she played the communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek series (1966-69). She was also involved in the US’s first small-screen kiss between a black woman and a white man, Uhura and Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner), in 1968.

Charles Nahale on the balcony of his temporary housing overlooking a lush golf course, in Kapalua, Maui, on 28 October. Photograph: Akasha Rabut/The GuardianCharles Nahale on the balcony of his temporary housing overlooking a lush golf course, in Kapalua, Maui, on 28 October. Photograph: Akasha Rabut/The GuardianThrough the roofHawaii firesFour months after the deadliest US wildfire in modern history, thousands of people have yet to find stable housing When Charles Nahale checked into a one-bedroom time-share condo in Kapalua Bay, a tourist mainstay on Maui’s north-west coast, in mid-October, front desk staff told him he would only be staying for 12 days.

Book of the dayFictionReviewThis thoughtful follow-up is a clever echo of Burton’s debut, tracing a woman’s coming of age in early 18th-century Amsterdam When we rejoin Nella Oortman, the heroine of Jessie Burton’s blockbuster 2014 debut The Miniaturist, we find her almost as we left her. She still lives in her dead husband Johannes Brandt’s home on the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam, along with Cornelia the cook, Johannes’s once-enslaved manservant Otto, and Thea, the child Otto fathered with Johannes’s steely sister, Marin.

The ObserverAstronomyInterviewCosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton: ‘Our universe is one tiny grain of dust in a beautiful cosmos’Killian FoxAs her new book on the origins of the universe is published, the Albanian-American scientist explains how her work on multiverse theory influenced Stephen Hawking, and how totalitarian rule shaped her hunger for knowledge Laura Mersini-Houghton was born in Albania and grew up under a totalitarian communist regime which, until its collapse in 1991, cut the country off from the rest of the world.