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 ...

Researchers elucidate the complex physical mechanisms and fluid dynamics involved in a handclap, with potential applications in bioacoustics and personal identification, whereby a handclap could be ...

What is the sound of one hand clapping? You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such ...

The clapping hands emoji: When used repetitively in a row, it signifies applause, but as any social media user by now understands, that is not the emoji's primary placement in the world of Twitter.