WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I ENVIED SALLY CULVER. Though she was five years younger, she had somehow managed to get herself a fan club. It began one summer evening, when Mrs. Culver brought her 1 year-old ...

Hand clapping is ubiquitous behavior for humans across time and cultures, serving many different purposes: to signify approval with applause, for instance, or to keep time to music. Acousticians often ...

In a scene toward the end of the 2006 film, "X-Men: The Last Stand," a character claps and sends a shock wave that knocks out an opposing army. Sunny Jung, professor of biological and environmental ...

Scientists have finally unravelled the complex process that generates sound during handclaps, a discovery that shows how even simple acts can be rich with physics. The key to generating sound from ...

once wondered, "Why must the show go on?" The same thought popped into mind on Thursday while observing the usually wonderful Christine Ebersole valiantly struggle to get through a staged concert ...

Primitive though they may be, given just a simple audio recording of a single handclap, is it possible to determine the hand-configuration of the clapper via a computer-assisted digital analysis of ...

Last summer I went to take in a movie at the Fine Arts theater on South Michigan Avenue, and was startled by what I saw. It wasn’t the movie that startled me; the movie was fine. It was the ...

One readily noticeable pathognomonic trait of autism is hand-flapping—a stereotyped motor movement that can look a bit like an attempt to accelerating the drying of nail polish. Not all with autism do ...