Remember the good ol' days, when the picture went out on your cathode-ray tube TV, and slapping the side of it would restore it? Or if your portable CD player broke, but it would still play if you held it at a certain angle?

This physical manipulation never seemed to work with cell phones and dropping calls. We tried every physical trick we could--keeping our fingers off the antenna, standing by the window, holding the phone off our face--but nothing ever worked.

Now scientists at Canada's Queen University believe they know why: dropped cell phone calls are a result of, get this, solar flares. Apparently those pesky little sun farts muck with the cell towers here on Earth. So until Verizon launches a special solar lander to fix the problem, we can stop trying to game our phones into cooperating.

via textually