14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The boy experimented to find the optimal parameters (height, width, angles) for load bearing of that earlier invention.
So, the result of his work would warrant a new patent, of course with reference to all earlier patents of which his work is an improvement.
I was more ready to accept the headline if it had been invented by the kid.
Are you telling me you can't roll up 10 origami papers and stand them on a reasonably stable origami pattern?
that makes way more sense
not enough coffee bcak
I’m glad I learned OS in depth during high school via Gentoo linux. And engineering/physics/math in college. It’s very easy to assimilate any new knowledge which can be understood through those areas of first principles.
But learning more advanced math is quite a task now.
I have ;-) far too many times! Even going back and taking undergrad math coursework that my engineering curriculum didn't have like Discrete Math or Statistics got a lot harder than calculus / differential equations was when I was younger. I felt like I got less out of each hour, and also couldn't put in as many hours - not just because I have more responsibilities, but also because my brain just gets tired after fewer hours.
Have you tried creatine supplements? Especially if you're vegan or don't eat a lot of meat. Most people take it for muscle performance, but I found it insanely helpful for maintaining a sharp mind throughout a long day, especially with little sleep. That's also what the latest research starts to appreciate. I wouldn't be surprised to see recommended doses above 10g/day in elderly soon-ish since there are basically zero downsides even at much higher doses. In my early 30s I thought I lost my ability to pull all nighters because of increased tiredness, but now I feel like I can do even more than when I was 18. Most people greatly underestimate diet in general because they used to get away with anything when they were young.
That said, while I think that creatine's effects on cognitive performance are often overstated, creatine is scientifically proven to increase brain performance in some cases[1].
And fortunately, creatine is safe and very cheap[2], so maybe worth a try.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatine#Cognitive_performance
2. https://www.bulksupplements.com/products/creatine-monohydrat...
> Did you have problems with tiredness and concentrating?
Yes. Still do.
> Especially after only getting very little sleep for an extended time?
No
> Or did you already consume a lot of meat?
Yes. I mean, I probably eat less meat than the average American, but certainly plenty. Beef, too (high in creatine).
> As with all supplements, a good diet and lots of rest can make them little more than expensive pee.
Yep, this probably describes me. It's still pretty cheap, so I still do it (especially since my kids take creatine as well).
>No
Then I'm not really surprised. I also see no real cognitive effects when everything is well anyways. But this one study is what I found to be the most accurate finding overall beyond enhancing muscle power:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10902318/
It's also super easy to test yourself.
this was rather famously the technique of Jonas Salk to learn and master things, switch fields every so often, giving you a wide base of disciplines to apply to new fields.
Most of the folklore around "neuroplasticity" I've found pretty underwhelming. But yeah, if even he says it at that level of consistent practice, that seems like a good yardstick.
I don't have the hours of time a young person does and I don't have the focus, there are a lot of other thoughts, emotions and responsibilities competing for my attention.
Would love someone who's aware of the literature to throw their hat in the ring though.
I'm sure I'll slow down eventually, but I've always found that thinking fast is vastly overrated. I've always had an easy time understanding things quickly, but it still takes me time to understand them well.
Though only in last few years did I realize I was a fast learner. I thought I was slow because I'd say I didn't understand unless I had a deep understanding. But found that where I would not feel comfortable claiming understanding was a different threshold than others.
Where I've found math and physics helpful is in depth and abstraction. The science builds a good framework to dive deep into understanding and tease out the critical components. Science is a search algorithm in some sense. The math helps abstract, or generalize. To see the patterns and extend and use in ways beyond what was taught. That's where the real compounding happens and where I personally start to feel I understand things. But it requires the depth. But that's my framework and I'm sure there's a million good ones and a million better ones
Physics definitely helps me learn things like a sport or driving a new vehicle. Forces me to think more about things like where force is being applied, positioning, paths, and many other things. I'll focus on the small things that compound and I think this makes the start a little slower but that makes things accelerate as my base isn't shaky as I'm moving forward.
But this also helps when I've doing things like learn a language. It's why I wrote the last paragraph like I did. The science side gives you the habit of breaking things down into their atomic units. The framework of build, attack/critique/deconstruct, rebuild. When I was younger I couldn't do this. If I were trying to do something like learn Chinese I'd first focus on just memorizing rather than focus on the radicals.
The iterative style of building up is such a useful framework. Naturally when forming a hypothesis you try to build something stable. But the most important thing to then do is attack it as hard as you can. This is a step most people don't take, but it's probably the most important one for finding truth. It damages and even sometimes completely destroys your construction. But when you rebuild it is better, it is stronger. The framework taught me the importance of doing the boring stuff like revisiting what I've already learned.
And that's also why I'm saying there's a million paths and I doubt my background that I'm leveraging is particularly advantageous. The base knowledge is helpful in the first example but nonexistent in the second. The utility still exists though because of the metaphysics/metamathematics. The framework of how to approach problems, to dive into details, to find what are the important parts, to navigate through mental spaces filled with many unknown unknowns. Maybe my neuroplasticity isn't as high as when I was a teen, but I sure didn't have the (mental) tools I have today and boy what a difference it makes.
someone like peter steinger can sit at home experimenting for hours and learn+create vastly more at the age of 48 than the average 30 year old
But, if you compare outright performance, the brain like any other part of the body is at its biological peak function in the late teens. Rachmaninov wrote most of his work as a teenager. mozart wrote first at age 8. zuckerberg create fb in undergrad. the youthful organism is full of vitality and ease
Same age and same experience. I am learning my third language, after acquiring my second to a fluent level in my early 30's (by living in a country where it's spoken). But it's an entirely different character set, and has nearly zero cognates. I'm sure some skills transferred from my second language learning but I'm massively enjoying it and don't feel bogged down.
I think a lot of it is managing my mental energy, I look at it as a finite per-day resource replenished by sleep. If I have a mentally heavy workday, or overly emotional day, I know my language skills will be sub-par and don't try too hard. I also approach my learning in the morning, when I have an excess of this energy, because my job will do a good job of getting it close to zero, regardless of the starting point.
I think we don't give enough credence to the mental toll of an adult life and corporate job, and how much that takes from us, versus when we were young.
I think it's so easy for people to discount "mental energy" since culturally we don't often acknowledge it as a finite resource the same way we do physical energy. Well maybe the problem is we view them as separate things in the first place.
When I was younger I just didn't have to worry about so much stuff.
In my mid-30s, I'm definitely slower to pick up new things than in my college days, but I have much more mental discipline and patience, a broader base of knowledge to draw from, and maybe the biggest differentiator: a much more developed sense of priority and focus in order to get more benefit out of less time.
One of possible explanations is a passion. What really helps to memorize are emotions. If something triggers emotions or somehow connected to them, then you have much more probability of remembering it. I felt strong about mathematics as a teenager, any math result I found was a happy event. Or rather not any result, I felt nothing about trigonometry formulas and I struggled to remember them, I invented techniques to reconstruct them. Mostly those techniques had nothing to do with math. But the point is: I remember what I like and don't remember boring things. It is emotions at work.
> a much more developed sense of priority and focus in order to get more benefit out of less time.
Which is an evidence confirming my hypothesis: you are not as interested in knowledge you acquire as you are interested in results. You are juggling priorities and subject your learning process to some higher goals. No more learning driven by emotions, now rationality is the king, no place for emotions.
It doesn't mean that my hypothesis is true, I just mention it for a completeness: we don't really know what is the reason behind learning difficulties growing with age. AFAIK even neuroplasticity itself can be at least partially caused by emotions.
Never underestimate our motivation.
I know when I’m actually able to sit quietly to study something, I’m able to pick it up fairly quickly. (One thing going for me is I’m much better able to sit still as an adult than a kid, ha.) But yeah, having to juggle work responsibilities for 8-9 hours a day and then having to also manage a bunch of things I didn’t have to think as hard about when I was younger (bills, cleaning, pets), I definitely just don’t have as much time to dedicate towards focused studying like that.
Although I've had to restrict it to the 2 desktop machines. Maybe I should give it a shot again on the laptops, now that binary packages are universally available...
Whether it's something completely new and alien - in which case children might be better, or whether it's learning through association - ie I understand that because I can connect it to previously learnt concepts ( which would favour people with more previous knowledge ).
For example, something like maths is often seen as a young persons game, but at the same time you probably don't want a 14 yr old running your company.
I can believe there are some things that would take me longer as an adult to learn than if I were a child (a new language for instance) but origami folding wouldn't be one of them.
I don't think that's true. As an extreme example, it takes a newborn a couple of years before they can start speaking a language; an adult can learn a few basic phrases in an hour or so.
The origami is Miura-ori fold by the way and they are already used in plenty of fields. Fairly interesting stuff from the 60s. Would have made for a great article.
The kids tested some paper configurations and specific fold patterns. Really impressive stuff considering it was totally impossible to do with computer simulation and hasn't been studied to death in aerospace. Neat science fair project, awful headline.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.
Getting it via origami is art and a testimony to wonders of intuition and observational learning, but getting the shapes could be done by other methods.
I'm trying to think of what I did when I was 14 that was as cool as that and I can't. I had an imagination and I created stuff all the time, but nothing I'd brag about today. The Space Pistol with Disintegrator Ray was only a prototype that I never managed to really put into production.
Is there anything useful about this? Maybe as an inexpensive(?) core for high strength skins?
Does that mean we could increase the orders of magnitude if we made it smaller? Lots of tiny stuff needs mechanical support. And lots of folded small things agglomerated is another way to say biology.
Even if we include things like hydroxyapatite in teeth, or even lignin, those are more like byproducts of biology than active biology itself.
I was thinking microscopic versus nanoscale. Folding something out of a flat material is probably cheaper than machining it, and if it's stronger than additively manufacturing it you have applications in medical devices and aerospace for starters.
> a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight
> Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. Famed for its use in aeronautical engineering, the fold has been leveraged to make solar panels for spacecraft and satellites. One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite launched in 1995.
Obviously not the same because the force isn't being applied perpendicular to the edges, but still, almost certainly will be not nearly linear.
Directly: no, the end of the article has a nice list of reasons why, somewhat hidden
(ex. "Actual shelters...need to respond to multidirectional loads" = these were tested with load in one direction)
Miles, if you're reading this, it's useful. You're already doing what .1% of people do. I call them journeys and emphasize they're a million steps without clear direction, and if you're lucky, maybe positive feedback along the way. You're just on step N < 1,000,000. This works out, in some way, you already know it's not literally "yes this is sooo useful that we should start autofolding it at 1000x scale". It will work out. maybe as exactly this, this with some tweaks, or the $25K helps you do $X, or the publicity helps you do $Y.
If I can make the shipping boxes less fragile with same amount of paper as current cardboard box designs, it is a win.
When the outside temperature was 90° and up, it was insanely hot 30 feet deep inside the trucks with no air circulation: we wore gloves and shorts. The noise also was incredibly loud, deafening. Toward the end of our shifts we were semi-delirious and exhausted and so we just threw the rapidly incoming packages over our heads back into the truck instead of stacking them as was proper.
So the damage was likely done long before the delivery person took it the last few feet.
Obviously that’s not “normal” damage to packages, because those things certainly aren’t getting delivered, but it’s not like these things get handled gently by the automation. Packages slide into collection belts where they land hard on top of other packages, they zip down chutes to be loaded into semis, etc.
There’s a reason they want breakables properly packed, and it’s not because the last-mile delivery guy is going to shoot a three with your box.
Tents don't need to be strong in compression - there's no weight on the roof. And obviously paper is not a material that scales up or would be practical for outdoor use.
Just a bit confused by the obvious mismatch here - maybe it's the journalist putting more weight on the disaster application than the kid did.
But there is on the floor, unless you expect the inhabitants to sleep more or less directly on the ground, including themselves, whatever is used as a mattress, belongings, small appliances, etc. Emergency habitation is not the same as a camping tent, it needs to be able to service populations that have difficulty with camping's limitations, like the elderly.
> Paper is not a material that scales up
Citation needed? It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly (source: Gemini, so feel free to take with a grain of salt).
> Or would be practical for outdoor use
If exposed directly to the elements, sure. But what if the paper is laminated or otherwise enclosed within plastic, rubber, or other synthetic material well-recognized as hydrophobic?
>Citation needed? It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly (source: Gemini, so feel free to take with a grain of salt).
Sorry, I meant in the sense of physical scale - I wouldn't imagine the properties of paper at 50cm scale translate directly to say 5 or 10 metre scale.
> It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly
They don’t mean production volume, they mean physically. You can’t increase the thickness of paper by 1000x to just make thicker, stronger, paper. It’s a different material entirely.
It's just an acknowledgement that the Miura pattern works and this kid kept his focus. To be perfectly honest, he just took something that was already done before (the fold) and applied it. Scientists do this all the time and win prizes--like cellophane tape to create graphene.
While this probably does have incredible Z-axis strength, I can't imagine it being very strong with any kind of lateral loads.
Biggest downside is their lack of moisture resistance.
14yo won $25k for origami that holds 10k times its weight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106871 - Dec 2025 (9 comments)
edit: What, they geoblocked a ~1min clip, wow.
What is "your country?"
I'm in the UK and it's geoblocked for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Masters_(American_TV_seri...
The idea of origami steel sheets has stuck on my mind ever since I found out about laser welding. Cutting thin 2mm sheets of steel, stitching them back together in different shapes, and holding tons of weight? That sounds very compelling to me.
I know it's been used to build engines, which suggests they are strong, but there's also all this process around ancient swords around tempering, folding, etc that suggests that maybe just 3D-printing metals might result in weaker structures.
I'm not sure that it's better than a dome; it might be for cases where you can't predict where on the top surface the load is going to be? I'm also not sure that a sheet of printed infill is sufficiently similar in its physical properties to a sheet of paper/card for this to transfer well, but it would be an interesting experiment to do.
This, clearly very clever, young man is 14 years old. The article says: "Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago."
At eight. He was *indulging* in a hobby at eight years old. Indulging in a hobby should be a pre-retirement activity. What an incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids.
I don't think indulge means what you think it means.
For anyone who hasn't understood my meaning:
Indulge is a word that implies that you're allowing yourself something that you might not ordinarily. The point being: it is (or should be) silly to suggest that a child can be said to indulge in a hobby. This is because the further implication is that an eight year old might show some restraint and focus on their book learning and networking.
You've got preconceived notions of what children "should be doing" in their free time to start with.
It's interesting because the approach of encouraging your kid to foster highly specific skills fails to satisfy the categorical imperative: if everybody did it, nothing would work. Or at least it seems that way... it's probably a safe bet that having a sizable majority of adolescents who are somewhat flexible/aimless and can respond to a variety of market demands in terms of career specialization is a good thing if not a necessary one.
On the other hand, manipulating (not to be taken with a necessary pejorative connotation) a child into this kind of specialization is almost certainly a necessary precondition for greatness. If you aren't a competent musician by the time you're 8 years old it is vanishingly unlikely you are ever going to be a true orchestral soloist. Ditto for something like chess. So if we want a world with those heights of greatness in it, we need to accept that some people are going to compel or allow their kids to be specialists rather than generalists.
To me this sounds like an exception to the rule than rule itself. Our society would be perfectly fine to not have this type of entertainer "greatness". I mean, we got rid of castrados because it went too far but the line between cutting kids testicles off vs making them play some useless game 12 hours a day for a decade is quite blury.
I'd argue this extreme specialization of children is fundamentally unethical and should be shunned or even made illegal but it'll take decades if not centuries for our society to realize this because we just value this type "greatness" too highly.
As it happens, I think I disagree with you. I do value greatness. I value a culture that lauds greatness. The point of virtuosic musicianship isn't entertainment, or at least not a banal thoughtless kind (a symphony is not a substitute good for ragebait podcast clips with a subway surfers overlay), it's inspirational art. The examples I chose are particularly evocative, but there's no real difference between that and a parent who compels or allows their child to become ridiculously capable in some kind of mathematics or literature. Imagine if Terrence Tao's parents had insisted that he carry on with a typical pre-university series of broad survey courses for the sake of making him a generalist! Imagine all the less high-profile examples who were maybe even more important to pushing some practical effort forward.
Making it illegal is a nonstarter because I think it runs afoul of the categorical imperative in exactly the same way. I'm a strong believer in the idea that most progress (again, not intended to have a positive connotation) is made by a small group of people who were almost never generalists. Einstein was not a generalist. Kant, who I've been referencing throughout this conversation, was really not a generalist. The possibility of greatness is just as necessary as a certain number of pliable generalists.
What would the point of living in a world without greatness be? Since I meant that question rhetorically: is there a way to allow such greatness to be achieved without manipulating young people into obsession?
I'd be willing to bet everything I have that our society on average would be better at every single specialized thing if everyone was well rounded generalist with minor specialization instead of niche expert and it's incredibly easy to see why given the era of technology were living through right now. After all, all best in anything are finally defeated by a few years of collective technological progress.
Now what's the meaning of life if we have no treadmill to run on indefinitely? Well that's for each to figure out but what a sad meaning it would be if it was just to be slightly better at one niche activity for a very short while?
My point is that I believe you have probably misinterpreted the author and used that as a basis to critisize them, unfairly in my view.
We don't all need to indulge (hey look another one) your personal perspective of how that word should be used.
Right. My objection was that you projected a negative meaning, which in my view was not demanded by the author. I could be wrong about what the author meant, but I didn't pick up any hint of "incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids". So yes from my perspective that suggested that you probably didn't know the meaning of the word or didn't consider that there was another way to interpret it.
> Although I'm sure the irony of your final quip has escaped you
No, that was the point. The word can be used more than one way.
> Out of curiosity, do you think this is a geo-cultural difference?
Definitely could be. I'm from the US.
Needs to? When did he sign up for it? It's not like he tried to patent a shelter design or bid for a government contract.
Who knows how ChatGPT made that suggestion [this time around]. Maybe 30% of the English-speaking population thinks it’s negative, or 60%, or perhaps someone simply wrote a high-profile negative op-ed that included the phrase in its title.
Anyways, not that you did this, but we need to be careful not to use LLMs as the deciding factor in how to feel about things. :) It gives too much power in swaying our thought to those who build the models.
The real issue here is that there's not much point in it, as the very thing that makes this useful (the ability to fold it up) would also make it collapse easily in a pressurized environment. You'd also have to deal with preventing leaks if you wanted air inside, likely by adding an outer hull, which would then defeat the purpose.
Adding 1 to _____ causes a doubling of resistance to pressure, adding 2 is a quadrupling, adding 3 is an octupling, what goes in the blank?
The weak points then turn out to be joints, material defects (the famous Titan failure), windows and other piercing points, and any unexpected shear forces.
I think it would be fun to build a playhouse out of it.
It has a particularly cool region in its configuration space where it can be bistable: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.93.03...
You won’t find a kid who’d say, “I want to be accountant when I grow up…” instead you’d find people want to be pilots or police officer….
> You won’t find a kid who’d say, “I want to be accountant when I grow up…”
When they realize that people with more money and more connections to powerful people get their way over people with less money and fewer connections to powerful people. The children of the former group also get a significantly better starting position in life compared to the children of the latter group. That is, if the latter manage to attract a suitable mate as poor people. If you choose dreams over money, you're not only failing your own potential desires and ambitions that will then probably never materialize, but also your future family and offspring. As the wealth inequality gap widens ever more, such pressures only intensify, and everything turns more and more into shit. Those kids' (from your post) desire to live a life with a fulfilling career is sacrificed at the altar to the dragons hoarding more and more wealth at all costs (billionaires).
I truely wish this kid continues to pursue his passion and not get side tracked with grim realities of the real world.
Agreed. But it doesn't go viral as much. Every cool robotics research goes with a comment that says "it could be useful for disaster response in a post-apocalyptic world where the conditions have changed in such a way that only my robot can save us".
In algorithmic design, we often struggle to balance form and physical function. But rigid foldability proves that finding the exact right geometric constraint actually creates the function. Respect to the 14-year-old.
The size and 10k amount here are impressive compared to the ant nonetheless
But the parents are doing lots of unappreciated work here.
/parent here
Parents or a teacher most likely guided this kid to empirically measure how much weight a known origami fold can hold. I mean I remember that we were guided to do similar experiments at school when I was the same age... I don't remember making the news for "14-year olds empirically confirm Newton's law" :-).
I don’t consider that the parent comment is seeking to “steal the spotlight”; just that it’d be a more realistic appraisal of how success is achieved.
1. He talked about them to people who were interested in listening.
2. He was able to apply the knowledge he gained for his specific task in a variety of team tasks at the event.
The web site is aggressively paywalled, to such a degree that I cannot determine the date of publication.
But they had a public access podcast and transcript here
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/article/unfoldin...
https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-project-showcase/
[1] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-top-300-junior-in... [2] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-finalists/
So how could he patent it?
I join the parent: it's a kid who empirically evaluated how much weight an existing fold can hold. It's not like he solved a hundred years old mathematical problem.
That said, it may not be strong enough to hold the weight of an adult on one foot.
At this age at school, I remember making all sorts of physics experiments. I don't think it would have been worth giving us a prize and publishing articles saying that "our work on the Newton's laws may someday lead to new insights about orbital mechanics". We dropped an object and measured the time it took to hit the ground, and checked that the physics formulas were predicting it pretty well. That's all.