14-year-old's origami pattern holds 10,000x its own weight, wins $25k prize
A teenager's simple paper fold could revolutionize emergency shelters and disaster relief...
Deep Dive
14-year-old Miles Wu won the $25,000 top prize at the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge for discovering a Miura-ori origami pattern that can hold 10,000 times its own weight. After 250+ hours of testing, he proved the tessellating parallelogram design could create strong, collapsible, and cost-effective deployable shelters for natural disasters. The innovation builds on origami's use in aerospace engineering and biomedical devices.
Why It Matters
This breakthrough could lead to rapidly deployable, ultra-strong emergency shelters that save lives during hurricanes and wildfires.