This week: the Arc Reactor!
The arc reactor first appeared in the film Iron Man (May 2008) as a portable power source that powered the magnet that kept a piece of shrapnel from entering Tony Stark's heart, as well as powering the Iron Man suit. It was a miniaturized version of a machine that Howard Stark built to create clean energy, a project that didn't go anywhere until Tony was able to miniaturize it. Side note: much evidence across the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows that the Arc Reactor is Howard Stark's attempt to create a man-made version of the Tesseract.
It later appeared in Invincible Iron Man #3 (July 2008), though instead called a Repulsor Technology Node. Pepper Potts was caught in an explosion that caused shrapnel to lodge into her body. Tony has a node implanted into her chest to keep the shrapnel from entering her heart. He also says he used one when the same thing happened to him in the Middle East, which essentially completely rewrites his origin to match the movie. Although the "Extremis" storyline from 2007 moved his origin to the Middle East, this is the first time it's been noted that he implanted something into his chest to help with his heart condition, rather than crating a whole chestplate to wear.
In Invincible Iron Man #21 (December 2009), Tony has to reboot the Extremis within his body to prevent Norman Osborn from gaining access to it. Doing so causes his body to shut down, so he has to get an RT Node implanted to restart it. Incidentally, this same issue seems to indicate he had both the RT Node and chestplate when he escaped Afghanistan.
The Arc Reactor/RT Node has continued to appear since then, although I'm not sure it's ever been vital to a storyline again. I'm also pretty sure neither Tony nor Pepper still have theirs; they're simply a way to power the suits these days.
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