Viral Video: While many 14-year-olds are busy making simple paper planes, Miles Wu is experimenting with intricate origami designs he hopes could someday support disaster-relief efforts.
The New York City teenager recently bagged a $25,000 prize for his research on the Miura-ori fold, a precise collapsible-and-expandable pattern.
Wu told Business Insider that he has spent over six years folding origami, mostly animals and insects, and has now begun creating his own complex designs.
A Passion That Evolved Into A Game Changing Concept
Wu has spent over six years perfecting the art of origami, often crafting intricate animals and insects. But as he kept folding, his curiosity shifted toward how these patterns might serve a purpose beyond creativity particularly in engineering and disaster relief design.
His interest sharpened after watching the impact of recent disasters, from the Southern California wildfires to Hurricane Helene’s destruction across the US Southeast in 2024. Those events pushed him to explore a bigger question: Could a traditional folding technique be adapted to build emergency shelters that are sturdy, lightweight, and easy to transport?
To test his theory, Wu set up a months-long experiment focused on measuring how much force the Miura fold could handle relative to its own weight. He studied how factors like paper material, fold angles, and the structure’s width and height affected its overall load-bearing capacity.
From Copy Paper To Incredible Strength
Wu’s research tested multiple variations three types of paper, three fold widths, three fold angles, and two fold heights creating 54 different Miura ori models and 108 load-bearing tests.
To keep the experiment consistent, he used a cutting machine for uniform folds, placed each sample in the same test setup, and gradually added weight until it gave way. The strength of some models exceeded his expectations so quickly that he had to ditch household books and switch to gym weights to keep going.
Wu initially believed that thicker paper and sharper, compact folds would produce the strongest structure. While tighter and less angled folds did make the models sturdier, the biggest surprise was that ordinary copy paper actually outperformed heavier sheets. In one trial, a single sample supported more than 10,000 times its own weight, a feat Wu compared to a New York cab hauling thousands of elephants.
From STEM Finale To Real World Impact
The Junior Innovators Challenge ranks among the toughest STEM competitions for middle-schoolers in the U.S. Students first qualify through local science fairs before advancing through multiple rounds that trim nearly 2,000 entries to 300 semifinalists and ultimately to just 30 finalists invited to Washington, DC.
Wu says he’ll put his prize money toward his education, but his focus is already shifting to real-world uses for his work. His next big aim is to build a functional prototype of a Miura ori based emergency shelter that could be quickly deployed in disaster zones.
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