14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight

Miles Wu folded a variant of the Miura-ori pattern that can hold 10,000 times its own weight

Sitting in his family’s living room in New York City, 14-year-old Miles Wu was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. For a total of more than 250 hours, Wu had diligently designed, folded and tested copious variations of the technique—a series of tessellating parallelograms that can fold or unfold in one fell swoop—to find one that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters.

“I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu, who’s currently a ninth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York City.

Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago. In 2024, he started exploring paper folding beyond its appeal as a creative pursuit. “I started reading about how different types of geometric origami were being studied and applied in STEM for their various physical properties,” he says.

Although origami dates back centuries, the fields of engineering, medicine, mathematics and architecture didn’t develop a profound interest in it until the 1960s. Since then, origami has been used in the design of biomedical devices, such as stents and catheters, and self-assembling robots.

Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. Famed for its use in aeronautical engineering, the fold has been leveraged to make solar panels for spacecraft and satellites. One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite launched in 1995.

The pattern of creases and angles, which can be manipulated to create many variations, “folds this really large sheet of paper into a really flat, compact shape, which I thought was really cool,” says Wu.

The teenager was researching the Miura-ori fold when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and wildfires raged in Southern California. “I thought maybe these origami patterns, which are strong and collapsible, could be used as emergency shelters in these natural disasters—kind of like a tent,” he explains.

Wu noticed that existing structures were sturdy, easy to deploy or cost-efficient, but rarely all three. “This creates a problem during emergency situations, such as hurricanes or wildfires, as deployable shelters ideally need to be produced quickly, set up easily, and able to withstand the elements,” he says.

To see if his idea had legs, Wu tested the strength-to-weight ratio of his folded patterns—or how much weight they could hold in comparison to their own weight. He began by drawing different variants of the Miura-ori using a computer program. The variables, set by him, were height, width and the measurement of the angles of the parallelograms in his patterns. Using three different types of paper, namely, a copy paper, light cardstock and heavy cardstock, he then set out to fold two of each of his 54 different variants through a series of 108 different trials. To reduce human errors in his experiments, Wu opted to use a scoring machine to accurately fold the origami patterns. Once folded, he placed each pattern—with a surface area of 64 square inches—between guardrails spaced 5 inches apart. Next, to check its strength, he added heavy weights on the origami until it broke.

Wu converted his family’s small living room into his own private lab. “At the beginning of my experimentation, I assumed the strongest Miura-ori would hold only around 50 pounds, and that I would be able to collapse the patterns with textbooks in my home,” the innovator says. But to his surprise, the patterns held up to 200 pounds, and the books, cast-iron pans and other weighted items available at his house were insufficient to truly measure the origami’s strength. “I finally had to ask my parents to buy 50-pound exercise weights,” Wu says.

The strongest Miura-ori that Wu tested held more than 10,000 times its own weight. “To put it in other words, this ratio is the equivalent of a New York City taxicab supporting the weight of over 4,000 elephants!” he exclaims.

Miles Wu, winner of the Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award (Thermo Fisher JIC 2025)

Wu’s innovation won the top prize of $25,000 at the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. Hosted by the Society for Science since 1999, it is the nation’s leading STEM competition for middle school students. Wu was among 30 finalists to reach the final round in Washington, D.C., which consisted of team STEM challenges.

“We’re really looking for the future scientific leaders of our country,” says Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of Society for Science and the executive publisher of its award-winning magazine, Science News. “And Miles was the number one winner.”

The judges were especially inspired by projects that were rooted in personal experience and community impact. “He was somebody who transformed a lifelong passion for origami into a really rigorous structural engineering project, where he was testing dozens of fold designs to measure their strength and potential,” Ajmera adds.

They also took into account Wu’s performance in the team challenges, where he applied origami principles to build components of a movable crab arm, demonstrating innovation, adaptability and collaboration under immense pressure.

“Miles really distinguished himself not only through the strength of his research, but also through his creativity and leadership during our competition STEM challenges,” Ajmera says. “I just think it’s just really wonderful to take the centuries-old art form of origami and use that in our everyday engineering.”

Glaucio H. Paulino, an engineer at Princeton University, studies how the application of origami techniques can transform flat materials into dynamic structures with programmable mechanical behavior. “Miles’ project is an excellent parametric exploration that demonstrates the use of geometry as structural property,” he says. “His results show that by tuning Miura-ori’s cell size and fold angle, you can meaningfully increase strength-to-weight ratio—this is one of the important properties that engineers use to make deployable systems practical.”

To achieve a functional shelter, however, Paulino points out, much more work must be done. Although scaling Wu’s Miura-ori research from home experiments to full-scale, disaster-ready shelters is feasible, it comes with a set of engineering requirements.

First, Wu needs to consider thicker origami solutions as he scales his design up. Another factor to note, Paulino adds, is that origami properties, such as strength, do not scale linearly, and as the design scales up, other considerations become relevant, such as joints and joint design, imperfections and buckling. “Actual shelters need to respond to multidirectional loads and durability demands that may require arches and systems level integration beyond small-scale compression tests,” he says.

Wu is quick to remark that he is only just beginning his scientific journey. “I definitely want to continue exploring and researching origami and how it intersects with STEM,” he says.

His first order of business is developing an actual prototype of an emergency shelter made from a singular Miura-ori curved into an arch, or multiple Miura-ori sheets combined to create a rectangular or tent-like structure. Before launching into action, he hopes to further test the strength of the pattern against not only lateral compression but multidirectional forces. “I’d also like to explore other ways that different origami patterns could be used in different scenarios,” Wu says.