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 ...

ITHACA, N.Y. — Every time you applaud at a concert or celebrate a touchdown, your hands are performing a feat of physics that scientists have puzzled over for decades. Cornell University researchers ...

In Japanese Zen Buddhism, a verbal puzzle known as a “koan” is often used to frustrate the process of logical thought to encourage the student to look beyond the boundaries, or limitations, of their ...

Nearly every human culture uses clapping to cheer, protest, pray or perform – but a new study reveals that the familiar gesture is as much a scientific event as it is a social one. “This is the first ...

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 ...

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 ...