The apparatus for one of the year\u2019s most celebrated student experiments was paper and gym equipment.<\/p>\n
Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, spent his project folding the same origami pattern over and over \u2014 54 systematic variations of it \u2014 and then crushing his own handiwork, loading dumbbells onto each folded structure until it gave way and writing down the number.<\/p>\n
Last October, that stack of creased paper and weights won him the $25,000 top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge<\/a>, the national middle-school competition run by Society for Science \u2014 the junior sibling of the storied Science Talent Search.<\/p>\n The fold with a space career<\/p>\n The pattern Miles chose wasn\u2019t decorative. The Miura-ori is the most famous crease pattern in engineering: a tessellation of parallelograms, invented by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura, that collapses a large sheet into a compact block and \u2014 its signature trick \u2014 unfolds in one smooth motion<\/a>, pulled open from two corners. Japan flew it to space in 1995 to deploy a solar array; it lives on in maps, satellite panels and stent designs.<\/p>\n What made Miles\u2019s project science rather than papercraft was treating that famous fold as an unexplored parameter space. A Miura-ori isn\u2019t one pattern but a family \u2014 panel size, crease angle, row count can each be tuned \u2014 and the structural consequences of those choices are exactly the kind of thing a kid with patience, paper and a weight bench can map exhaustively.<\/p>\n So he mapped it: 54 variants, each loaded with dumbbells until failure.<\/p>\n What the crushing revealed<\/p>\n The dataset produced a clean design law. Folds with smaller panels and steeper crease angles weren\u2019t just stronger \u2014 they were remarkably resilient<\/a>, holding their integrity rather than failing suddenly. Tighter, sharper folding packs more load-bearing geometry into the same footprint \u2014 more walls per square inch, effectively \u2014 and the best of his configurations supported more than 9,000 times their own weight before collapse.<\/p>\n For scale: a structure with that ratio, weighing as much as a bag of flour, would carry a car. And it started as a flat sheet.<\/p>\n The application Miles has named is the one the geometry begs for: strong, lightweight shelters that ship flat and deploy fast<\/a> in disaster zones. Emergency shelter is a logistics problem before it is a housing problem \u2014 the structures are needed by the thousand, immediately, at the end of broken supply chains \u2014 and a Miura-based building would fly as a dense stack and open like a map, its strength coming from crease geometry rather than heavy framing. His prize-announcement plans point exactly there, putting him in step with a genuine research frontier: origami engineering is currently one of the busiest corners of structural design, from NASA solar arrays to foldable bridges.<\/p>\n The shape of a proper experiment<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth pausing on the method, because it\u2019s a miniature of how materials science actually works.<\/p>\n Miles didn\u2019t invent the Miura fold, and didn\u2019t need to. He took a known structure, varied it systematically along its natural parameters, tested every variant to destruction under identical conditions, and extracted a generalizable rule \u2014 smaller panels, steeper angles, more strength \u2014 that someone else could now apply at shelter scale without repeating the 54 experiments. One variable at a time, failure as data, the answer as a design principle rather than a single artifact. Plenty of graduate work follows a looser protocol.<\/p>\n And the equipment list is the story\u2019s quiet punchline. The competition he won celebrates access to STEM, and his project is the proof of concept: no lab, no fabrication budget, no instrument more specialized than the family\u2019s dumbbells. The expensive part was the discipline \u2014 folding the same pattern 54 times with controlled precision, and being willing to destroy every one of them.<\/p>\n The origami masters have always said the crease pattern is the real object; the paper is just where it lives. Miles Wu\u2019s version of that idea now has numbers attached, a five-figure prize, and a possible future as the roof over someone\u2019s worst week: fold it right, and a flat sheet will hold nine thousand of itself.<\/p>\n About this article<\/p>\n This article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.<\/p>\n Follow Space Daily on Google<\/p>\n Add us as a preferred source to see more Space Daily reporting in Google.<\/p>\n \t\t\tAdd as preferred source<\/a><\/p>\n A personal measure of deep time<\/p>\n \t\t\tSee what has changed in the universe since you were born.<\/p>\n Begin with one date. Get a personal, sourced journey through everything that kept moving after you arrived.<\/p>\n Six sourced measurements. No predictions. No astrology.<\/p>\n Standards<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tSpace Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards<\/a> and masthead<\/a>.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The apparatus for one of the year\u2019s most celebrated student experiments was paper and gym equipment. 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