The project is known as Smart Sand, which at this point is a bit of a misnomer, given the size of the cubes (about 1.2 cm along each side), but as this is an early proof of concept, its easy to look past that and see instead the potential of the technology.

Given the size of the cubes, no single component can individually process the amount of data required to replicate, so instead they share and communicate by touching together the metal electrodes on each side. This shared processing has a certain amount of redundancy built in in case any individual cube fails, and the team say that the system has been run hundreds of times using various shapes.

Kyle Gilpin, one of the team's researchers, said at this year's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation that they hope to shrink the tech down to 1mm sized modules, but that's still a ways off.

The most intriguing possibility from all this is that you could essentially just used smart sand for everything, dissolving a replicated object back down when you're finished with it, before turning it into something else later. Complicated objects like computers would be quite  a way off, but simple tools are conceivable in the medium term.

Such tech could, of course, take over the world, and would probably do so in creepy metallic spider form (thank you Stargate), but at least it will do so in true sci-fi style.

[IEEE]