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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A round of applause, please: Scientists have finally figured out what’s behind the sound of clapping. The research pinpoints a mechanism called a Helmholtz resonator — the same acoustic concept that ...

On a movie set, every scene and every take gets "slated" during filming, and there's that distinctive clap sound we all know. But what's it for?... 'Clap!' On Set, The Signature Sound Of The Slate ...