Alarm clocks are built to wake you up, but in practice they wake you just enough to hit the snooze button and then fall back asleep. Liam Hastie, a student at Strathclyde University in Scotland, has developed an alarm clock that makes sure you're really awake before shutting off. Featuring a Simon-like memory game, the clock randomly generates a series of colors, then forces users to then hit them off in the correct order. If you fail, the alarm keeps blaring. Such an alarm clock would probably do a great job of waking you all the way up, although it stands a good chance of becoming the most hated object in your home. No word on whether or not the tried and true "toss the clock into the wall" method would allow the user to bypass the forced pattern game. — Adam Frucci