Miles Wu, a teenager from New York, won $25,000 for a Miura-ori origami model, capable of supporting over 10,000 times its own weight, having potential in disaster response.

Miles Wu, a 14-year-old from New York, was awarded $25,000 for his discovery in the field of origami, a model called Miura-ori, which can support over 10,000 times its weight. Wu, passionate about origami for over six years, conducted a research project to evaluate the potential of this fold in improving emergency structures. He tested different types of paper and sizes of parallelograms, analyzing 54 variants and conducting 108 tests to determine the strength of the model.

Inspired by natural disasters, Wu emphasized that current emergency structures do not effectively combine strength, compactness, and ease of assembly. Miura-ori could solve these problems. The young man used books and training weights for his experiments, discovering that his model can support weights equivalent to a New York taxi carrying over 4,000 elephants. This innovation has the potential to improve disaster response.