Abstract: As we learnt from Young and Laplace, the cohesion of fluids makes them choose specific shapes, in particular spheres at a small scale. We discuss several ways to maintain this ideal shape on a solid, which leads to unique dynamical situations: water pearls do not stick, they run easily and they bounce - a little bit as if they were solid marbles. (But they are not. And the liquid nature of these pearls has interesting consequences on the dynamical shapes they adopt, for example.) The high mobility of liquid pearls implies that tiny forces are sufficient to move them, and we plan to present recent achievements where some asymmetric patterns at a solid surface permit the self-propulsion of the liquid. We would also like to discuss the effects of various fields to control these elusive drops.