One of the rewards of inventing something new is that you get to name it. The name doesn't always stick; with familiarity, "horse less carriages" tend to become "automo biles" and finally mere "cars." But the original coinage stands as a wonderful snapshot of how we saw the world at a certain moment, flush with delight in new pos sibilities. And given a chance to make their mark in the lexicon, even the most sober scientists can be gleefully silly: Think of particle physics' quarks and squarks, its muons and gluons. One of the most poetic neologisms of 2016, included in our year-end round-up of the best new words, was "dark sunshine": hypothetical photons generated by (equally hypothetical) dark matter in stars.

Try Rovables: pocket-sized robots that live on your clothes. The bots, developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, look like miniature cars with a custom-designed circuit board for a roof. With the help of magnetic wheels that pinch the fabric, they can roam freely up and down clothing for 45 minutes at a stretch, stopping in place to pose as a brooch or a bracelet. "I've never actually seen a robot that can independently drive itself around your clothing," says Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, an associate professor at the Pratt Institute, New York. But the robots aren't just there to make you look cool. At this week's User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Tokyo, the team described how Rovables could also have practical uses as sensors, digital displays, or for tactile feedback.

Wearables have gotten smaller and less obtrusive over the years, culminating in today's compact fitness trackers and smartwatches that stay immobile and out of the way. But that doesn't have to be the case. Researchers at MIT and Stanford teamed up to develop Rovables, miniature robots chock full of sensors that roam around the human body while the wearer goes about their lives. This gives them an edge over traditional static wearables, the research teams says in their paper: Rovables might seamlessly assemble into a wristwatch or nametag, reacting to the host or the environment. The bots are little bigger than a ring box, but they pack a microcontroller, wireless communications and a battery that powers them for 45 minutes of continual use.