Modern cubicle dwellers are about two steps removed from Gollum—hunched over, pasty, probably talking to themselves. At least one study published in an actual scientific journal has suggested that Tolkien's cave-dwelling cretin may have been evil in part because of Vitamin D deficiency. So too, perhaps, with office workers deprived of sunlight. But how to know if one's dark urges stem from a black and sludgey soul or just from not going outside enough?

The SunSprite is a little device you can clip onto your clothes that measures exposure to sunlight, keeping track with a row of LCD lights on the front. Like everything does these days, it also syncs with a smartphone app to show your sunshiney stats. It might inspire the indoor kids of the world to take their sandwich outside for lunch—and in the event someone takes it too far, it also sends alerts when UV ray exposure gets too high.

—Julie Beck

TEC Home Ear Cleaner

Here’s something you probably never wanted to know about an Internet stranger: In college, I had to make a trip to the student-health center to get chocolate pudding flushed out of my ears. I won’t go too far into the story, except to say that it involved a food fight, a few days of partial deafness, and a syringe that shot very cold water at a very high speed. If anything can turn a person off of pudding, it’s getting a blast of ice water to the ear canal, but there are some things Q-tips just can’t do.

In fact, when it comes to ears, Q-tips can’t do much of anything—at best, they just push wax further in, and at worst they puncture an eardrum—and around 12 million Americans go to the doctor every year specifically to get their ears cleaned. The TEC Home system, as the name implies, promises the same heavy-duty, professional-level cleaning at home. The whole thing seems much more pleasant: The machine heats the water to a comfortable temperature and then sprays it against the side of the ear canal to loosen whatever’s inside. There’s even a chamber at the bottom to collect anything that comes out, snack food or otherwise.

—Cari Romm

Absolute Knowledge of Health-Behavior Psychology

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