Have you ever thought of air as the ultimate crop fertilizer? We haven’t either, but researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed a technology—termed nitrogen fixation—that allows plant to take nitrogen directly from the air. A special bacteria takes up nitrogen from the air and applies it to plant seeds as coating, enabling each plant cell to spontaneously ‘fix’ nitrogen. The new technology could be commercially available within the next couple of years and it has the potential to replace environmentally damaging fertilizers.