Skip to content
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Menu
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Happy News

World Strongest Oragami Is Put To The Test

While most 14 year olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu from New York City is folding origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief after winning $25,000 for his research project. Wu has been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects, and recently started designing his own. His winning project at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October focused on an origami fold called Miura ori, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision. Wu spent months testing whether the strength to weight ratio of the Miura fold could be leveraged to improve deployable structures used in emergency situations like tents. He got the idea while learning about natural disasters like the 2025 Southern California wildfires and 2024’s Hurricane Helene, discovering that current emergency structures are sometimes strong, sometimes compact, and sometimes easily deployable, but almost never all three.

Wu tested 54 hand folded variations across 108 trials using three different parallelogram widths, three different parallelogram angles, two different parallelogram heights, and three different types of paper. He placed each variation between guardrails and gradually added weight on top until they collapsed, using every book in his home before having to ask his parents to purchase exercise weights. Wu believed smaller and less acutely angled panels made of heavier material would yield a greater strength to weight ratio, but his hypothesis was only partially correct. While small and less acutely angled panels showed better ratios, copy paper had the strongest strength to weight ratio, not heavier materials. The strongest Miura ori Wu tested could hold over 10,000 times its own weight, which he calculated to be the equivalent of a New York City taxi cab holding over 4,000 elephants. Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the Society for Science, says Wu not only had an extraordinary project but shined as a leader in the competition’s creative problem solving challenges. Wu and his parents decided to put the $25,000 award toward higher education, but he’s already thinking about prototyping a real Miura ori emergency shelter that could be used in real life situations to actually help people. The teen wants to keep working on origami related research across different fields, proving that sometimes the most unexpected hobbies can lead to solutions for the world’s most pressing problems.

PrevPreviousMetallica Is Creating The Next MILLIONAIRES
NextThese Squirrels Ate Better Than Most PEOPLE On ThanksgivingNext

Recent Articles

Happy News

Speed-Dating For Friends Is Here: Speed-Friending

March 25, 2026

America is in the middle of what researchers are calling a friendship recession, and the numbers behind it are striking. In 1990, about 3 percent of Americans said they had no friends at all. Today that figure has grown to somewhere between 12 and 20 percent, a shift that scientists

Read More
Happy News

The 2028 LA Olympics Just Revealed Its Official Look

March 24, 2026

The countdown to Los Angeles 2028 just got a lot more colorful. LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Summer Olympics, has unveiled the official visual identity for the Games — and it’s a breathtaking love letter to Southern California. Dubbed “LA in Full Bloom,” the design concept is inspired

Read More
Happy News

Dog Finds A Message In A Bottle That Crossed The Atlantic From Canada

March 24, 2026

On a wildly stormy morning on a beach in northeast Scotland, a dog named Maggie was doing what dogs do best: sniffing everything in sight. Her owner Mike Scott, a photographer who walks his dogs at St Cyrus in Aberdeenshire almost every day, noticed Maggie circling a dark glass bottle

Read More
« Previous Next »
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2026 HappyNews.