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 ...

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 ...

I’m a 31-year-old attractive single woman, and I recently went on Match.com and found a guy. Our e-mails and one phone conversation went well, and he seemed kind and was OK-looking in his picture, so ...

Clapping is a behavior so deeply rooted in human beings it’s almost an instinct. You can see babies and toddlers clapping just because everybody else is, and if you’ve ever felt the pressure to be ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...