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 ...

Social contagion If you wish to avoid the social faux pas of clapping at the wrong time, listen carefully to the volume of noise around you. That's the conclusion of a study about the social dynamics ...

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 ...

In a pivotal scene from the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, a mutant claps his hands and blasts a shockwave across a battlefield. In a theater somewhere, Sunny Jung watched—and wondered. “It made me ...