Bobbing your head, tapping your heel, or clapping along with the music is a natural response for most people, but what about those who can’t keep a beat? Researchers have discovered that beat-deafness ...

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 ...

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 ...