Ultimately, these lights can do a lot. They can double as a sound machine, help you wake up and fall asleep, and even act as a regular bedside lamp if they’re bright enough. Not all sunrise alarms have all of these features, though, so you have to choose how much you want to spend and what features are most important to you.

What Features Should You Look for in a Sunrise Alarm Clock?

You might see a range of features listed for a sunrise alarm, and more expensive ones will include more of these than cheaper models. If you’re not sure what features you want, try this series of questions to figure out what features you need.

Do you struggle to fall asleep? Splurge on a sunrise alarm with a nighttime or wind-down routine. These help build a routine for you to fall asleep to.

Do you need one device that doubles as an alarm and a bedside lamp? Get a brighter sunrise clock that has easy controls to switch it on as a bedside lamp. Not all sunrise clocks have these, so check the details carefully (and reviews like mine!) and note that cheaper, smaller sunrise alarm clocks usually won’t brighten an entire bedroom.

Are you picky about your alarm sounds? Check how many sounds are offered. Just about every sunrise clock has some sound machine features and options, but cheaper ones tend to only have a couple of sounds and might not have the sound you’re looking for.

Do you want app control? Some options in this guide don’t have a partner app or Wi-Fi capabilities, especially some of my favorites. An app doesn’t necessarily make it a better sunrise clock, but it can be convenient to use. If you prefer an app to set up your sunrise lamp, shop the Casper, Hatch, Loftie, and WiiM.

Which Sunrise Alarm Clocks Are Best?

This sunrise alarm is my favorite one. It’s big and bright with a stylish exterior, and has a button for lamp mode so you can easily switch it on to use in the evening as a regular lamp, and it was bright enough to fill my bedroom like a normal lamp. It has a nice range of sounds, and not only connects to the radio but allows you to save five stations. There are both sunrise and sunset settings. The biggest downside is it only has a 24-hour clock, and it doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi or an app so you have to set the time manually (and change it manually for daylight saving). If you want to spend less, the Shine 300 ($169) is a little smaller and has fewer sounds, but otherwise is similarly great.

The very existence of left-handedness seems to defy Darwin. According to the theory of evolution by natural selection (in very simplified terms), a species should retain the characteristics necessary for survival and reproduction and discard those that are not very useful. And yet around 10 percent of people continue to develop greater dexterity in their left hand, a rate that has remained stable throughout history. Why do humans continue to retain this peculiar ability?

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy set out to confirm a hypothesis indicating that, while right-handed people have advantages in cooperative behaviors, left-handed people—particularly males, the study notes—have advantages in competitive behaviors, especially in one-on-one situations. This hypothesis is based on evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), a concept from game theory applied to evolution.

This is how ESS explains why the proportion of left-handed people remains low but constant. If almost everyone in a population is right-handed, being left-handed offers a frequency-dependent advantage: Being in the minority, left-handers are less predictable in competitive interactions (e.g., a boxing match), which may translate into small advantages (left hook!). But if left-handedness became very common, that advantage would disappear because others would adapt to encountering left-handers with the same frequency. In evolutionary terms, a “stable equilibrium” is reached when the majority are right-handed and a minority are left-handed, because neither “strategy” can completely eliminate the other since their advantages change depending on how frequent each is in the population.

How can a study support this hypothesis? The Italian researchers conducted two experiments to see whether a dominant hand is linked to any specific personality type. The results were recently published in the academic journal Scientific Reports.

Righty vs. Lefty

In the first experiment, about 1,100 participants completed questionnaires designed to measure their handedness (their level of dexterity between one hand and the other) and various facets of competitiveness, such as their inclination to achieve personal goals or their aversion to anxiety-driven competition. The results showed that people who identified with greater left-handed laterality tended to show higher levels of personal development-oriented competitiveness and lower levels of anxious avoidance. That is, left-handers tended to be more inclined to engage in competitive situations than right-handers.

In addition, when strongly lateralized groups were compared (just pure southpaws, no ambidextrousness), left-handers scored higher on “hypercompetitiveness,” a trait that implies an intense desire to win, even at the expense of others.

In the second experiment, a subgroup of 48 participants (half right-handed and half left-handed, with equal proportions of men and women) took a pegboard test, a classic laboratory test that measures manual dexterity. Interestingly, no significant differences were observed here either between left-handers and right-handers or between laterality measures and competitiveness scores. This suggests that hand preference and competitiveness are not directly related to motor skills.

Give Them a Hand

According to the authors of the study, left-handedness is not simply a biological accident, but a characteristic that may offer advantages in competitive contexts and is therefore worth preserving. This supports, at least in part, the idea that the unequal distribution between right-handers and left-handers could be maintained by an evolutionary balance. While the right-handed majority favors social cooperation, the left-handed minority benefits in competitive contexts, where surprise plays a role.

But what about other personality types? Are left-handed people more extroverted or more emotionally unstable? The study cited here found no significant differences between left-handed and right-handed people in the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Nor was there any relationship between handedness and levels of depression or anxiety in this sample of people without a psychiatric diagnosis. This suggests that the advantage associated with left-handedness is more linked to competitiveness than to general differences in personality or mental health.

The study also examined differences by sex. Men, in general, scored higher on hyper-competitiveness and development-oriented competitiveness, while women showed a greater tendency to avoid competition due to anxiety. This suggests that the interaction between hand preference, competitive profile, and gender is complex and likely influenced by multiple biological and environmental factors that warrant further investigation.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Coffee is the original office biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we lose sleep to the changeover to daylight saving time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite coffee brewing routines and devices that’ll keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, reviewer Matthew Korfhage expounds on his lasting love for drip coffee—and why the Ratio Four never leaves his counter. In the days after, we’ll add other Java.Base stories about other WIRED writers’ favorite brewing methods.

As with any vice worth having, a morning coffee routine can take on the character of religion. And like a lot of religion, it’s often born as much accident as moral conviction. My denomination is good, old-fashioned drip coffee. That’s what I drink first thing, before I even think about crafting a shot of espresso.

I’m WIRED’s lead coffee writer and I’ve developed a deep fondness for coffee’s many variations, from espresso to Aeropress to cold brew. But “coffee” to me, in my deepest soul, still means a steaming mug of unadulterated drip. Luckily, that’s also the coffee arena that has been transformed the most by technology in recent years. The drip coffee from the Ratio Four coffee maker (now quietly on its second generation) feels to me like coffee’s purest form, the liquid distillation of what my coffee beans smell like fresh off the grinder.

My love of filter coffee began as a teenager traveling and studying in India—perhaps my first glimpse of adult freedom. This is where I drank the first full cup of coffee I remember finishing. In Jaipur, filter coffee was an intense, jet-black gravity brew typically mixed with milk and sugar. I decided that if I was going to drink coffee, I would take it straight and learn to like it on its own terms. A newfound friend, tipping jaggery into his own brew, laughed at my insistence I didn’t want sweetened milk. I then downed a cup so thick and strong and caffeinated it made my hairs stand at perpendicular. If I’d made a mistake, I refused to admit it.

I carried this preference back to Oregon, drinking unadulteratedly black, terrible drip coffee at all-night diners and foul office breakrooms. Black coffee had become a morality clause, though it was hardly a matter of taste.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that drip coffee could actually be an indulgence every bit as refined as pinkies-up espresso.

Upping the Drip

In part, this was a problem of technology. Aside from a classic Moccamaster, it’s only very recently that home drip coffee makers have been able to produce a truly excellent cup. For years, I didn’t keep one at my home.

What woke me up to drip’s possibilities was a new wave of cafes in Portland, first third-wave coffee pioneer Stumptown Coffee and then especially Heart Coffee Roasters in Portland. Heart’s Norwegian owner-roaster, Wille Yli-Luoma, expounded to me at length about the aromatic purity of light-roast immersion coffee—the fruity aromatics of a first-crack Ethiopian that could smack of peach or nectarine or blueberry. Scandinavians had long prized this, he told me, and had evolved light-roast coffee into pure craft. America was finally catching up.

Still, I could never quite get that same flavor or clarity on a home brewer. Not until recently. To get the best version, I still had to walk up the street to Heart and get my coffee from the guy who roasted it. Or I had to spend way too long drizzling water over coffee in a conical filter. I rarely wanted to do this while still bleary from sleep, already late for work.