The World's Smallest Sandcastles Are Built on Individual Grains of Sand

The artist Vik Muniz is always pushing boundaries. We've previously seen his peanut butter and jelly Mona Lisas, his art reproductions made with torn-up magazines and his clown skull. Those projects push the boundaries of materials. But Muniz also pushes out space. He found that as his studio physically expanded, so did his projects. Eventually, he used earth moving equipment to create drawings hundreds of meters across.
Now, Muniz is going in the opposite direction. He had explored art at the gargantuan scale and was ready to create it at the microscopic level. So he sketched sandcastles and sent them to Marcelo Coelho, a designer who is skilled in the artistic use of a focused ion beam. With special equipment, Coelho can etch lines 50 nanometers wide. That's about one thousandth of the width of a human hair.
You results are beautiful sandcastles on grains of sand. You can read more about the project and see more images at Colossal.