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Simmons blogs at Thoughts on Global Warming and Thoughts on the World. If you feel like writing for us, drop us an email!

Imagine powering your electricity by sitting down. Two MIT students have found a way to be lazy and generate their electricity by doing exactly this.

James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk have showed that the simple act of sitting on a stool can generate enough power to turn on 4 LED lights and that a single stride provides enough power to light a single 60 Watt light bulb for 1 second.

A relatively few 84 million strides could power a space shuttle launch.

The Crowd Farm concept relies on the related principle that mechanical movement can be converted into electricity, though on a larger scale. The mechanics would be supplied by a spongy floor in which embedded blocks move under the weight of passing pedestrians. The conversion process itself could be handled by a generator that uses a rotating coil and electromagnets to produce an electric current from the mechanical movement.

This all leads you to ask yourself, very seriously, “How much power do I generate by sitting on the toilet?”