While these aren’t wuite as small as grains of sand MIT researchers have come up with tiny magnetic cubes that can communicate with each other which enables them to auto dublicate objects using what researchers are calling a subtractive production algorithm.

The miniscule devices were created in MIT’s Distributed Robotics Labratory at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labratory and researchers are hoping that smart sand will allow for spontanuous formation of replacements for broken parts.

Here is a short video of this smart sand from MIT.

via SlashGear