Dot.com? No, Dot-dash: Dot. Dash. Dash. Dot. Dash. Dot.

By summer, that will be the international symbol for the @ sign used in e-mail addresses, under the quaint but rarely used Morse code system.

A working group of the U.N. International Telecommunication Union last month recommended the first change to the code since at least the 1930s. Approval is expected this spring, spokesman Gary Fowlie said.

Morse code, whose origins date back to Samuel Morse’s invention of the electromagnetic telegraph in the 1830s, has diminished in use over the decades, replaced by voice and computer bits.

Even its primary users – ham radio and other amateur operators – tend to communicate via voice, said David Sumner, secretary of the International Amateur Radio Union.

But “many of us just prefer to use Morse code,” he said. “It’s more fun than talking.”

And many amateur operators like to carry to the Internet conversations they started over the airwaves. And hence the need for an @ sign to exchange e-mail addresses.

“Up till now, it’s done by leaving a big space, sending ‘a’ and ‘t’ and then leaving another big space,” Sumner said. “But it’s appropriate to have an internationally recognized signal. This eliminates ambiguity.”

You can hear it now, overseas: Verizon Wireless plans to begin selling this spring a cell phone that its subscribers can use around the world as well as in the United States.

The phone will have chips for two kinds of wireless network systems – the CDMA standard used by Verizon in America and the GSM standard used in most of the rest of the world. In most places the GSM calls will be carried by Vodafone PLC, the British cell phone company that owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless.

The phone is due to debut in April. Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Boyd Raney would not disclose the price or the phone’s manufacturer.

She said the phone is designed for workers for international companies that “increasingly need and want and ask for a phone of this nature.”

U.S. cellular carriers that employ the GSM standard here, including Cingular, T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, already offer phones usable worldwide. But Verizon Wireless would be the first to provide dual service on CDMA and GSM networks in one phone.

Sprint PCS, the other national CDMA carrier in the United States, plans to role out a dual CDMA/GSM phone later this year.

Biotechs battle county ballot measure: The biotech industry is spending heavily to defeat a ballot measure that would ban genetically engineered crops and animals in a sparsely populated region in Northern California.

Opponents of the Mendocino County measure, which if passed would be the first of its kind in the nation, have raised $318,863, of which the industry-sponsored CropLife America of Washington D.C. has contributed $300,000.

Backers of the measure have raised $67,118, with its largest single contribution of $23,902 coming from the Washington D.C-based Center for Food Safety. More than 1,000 Mendocino residents have also donated in support.

Measure H, scheduled for Tuesday, would have little direct effect inside the county as no known genetically modified crops are being grown there.

But it could give local organic growers a marketing tool, especially in Europe, where opposition to genetically engineered foods is fierce.

There are 47,000 registered voters in the politically eclectic county about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

Associated Press