In a quiet laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, scientists have spent two years reading the genetic language of thousands of microorganisms, searching for a capacity that plants have long possessed: the ability to pull carbon dioxide from the air and transform it into life. What they found — 306 microbial strains carrying the machinery for carbon fixation, 173 of them previously unknown to science in this regard — does not yet change the world, but it expands the map of what living things can do, and by extension, what we might ask them to do on our behalf.