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.