America: Land of the crummy-sounding cell phone

Want to buy a high-definition cell phone? You can now get one in 22 countries, including Uganda — but not the U.S.

FORTUNE -- Thirty years of experience have taught people to expect conversations over mobile phones to be low-fidelity affairs. But around the world people are quickly learning it doesn't have to be that way.

Today, the technology exists to make mobile phone calls sound not just good, but flat-out great. This MORE

Cox kills its wireless network in a grim omen for the industry

Why Cox is abandoning its much-hyped cellular network, and why it's a bad sign for any new wireless entrant.

FORTUNE -- AT&T executives looking to convince regulators to approve Ma Bell's merger with T-Mobile argue that the cell phone market is plenty competitive. Just look at the growth of new competitors such as Cox Communications, a cable company that built and runs a brand new cellular network, they say.

Cox appears to make MORE

Cell phone use is way up. So why did brain cancer rates fall?

Despite a 500-fold increase in radiation exposure from cell-phones since 1990, brain cancer rates have fallen.

FORTUNE -- During the 1980s, just as Americans began pumping low-frequency radiation through their skulls with cell phones, brain cancer rates in the U.S. slowly increased. At the beginning of the decade, doctors delivered the devastating diagnosis of brain cancer to 63 out of every 1 million Americans every year; by 1990 that number had risen MORE

Royal wedding online: not as popular as soccer

With America asleep and saturation coverage available on old-fashioned TV, online viewership for the wedding was meager.

So much for today's royal wedding straining the Internet to the breaking point.  Even at the ceremony's height, Internet users around the world only downloaded 5.4 million pages per minute. That makes it only the sixth most popular online news event in history -- right behind the U.S. match with Algeria in the World MORE

Internet's backbone fuses: Level 3 buys Global Crossing

The world's dominant Internet backbone just got a lot more dominant. Should we worry?

Level 3 already runs the single most important part of the Internet. Of the 36,878 autonomous networks that collectively make up the global Internet, Level 3 (LVLT) is by far the largest and most interconnected.  Buying Global Crossing (GLBC), which by most measures is now the global Internet's third largest part, in a $3 billion deal will only cement that position.

The MORE

Turning China green: Li Lu's case for optimism

China will grow on a scale the world has never seen before. Can that growth be green?

The environmental consequences of China's economic growth are both well-known and horrifying: more cars, more coal and more toxic crud fouling its streams and rivers. Less appreciated are the reasons for hope.

"This is a critical year, really a transformational moment," says Li Lu, the chairman of Himalaya Capital Management and a leading candidate to MORE

Bill Joy: Better batteries key to Green power adoption

Kleiner Perkins' Green guru believes on a household level, green power needs to recharge advanced batteries rather than plug right into the fuse-box.

FORTUNE -- Having helped both create the Java programming language and co-found Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy is best known as a technologist and entrepreneur. He hopes to add environmentalist to that list.

As a partner at leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Joy is devoting much of his time to MORE

An audacious new theory to compete with "Peak Oil": Hydrocarbons forever.

New companies say pulling carbon dioxide straight from the air could solve global warming and provide an infinite source of gasoline. Really?

FORTUNE -- What if scientists could transform coal-fired power plants from giant carbon dioxide emitters into giant carbon sinks? Some say that they can, and will. Graciela Chichilnisky, a founder of Global Thermostat, admits it's hard to believe: "The more energy the less the emissions—it's mind boggling."

Global Thermostat and at least MORE

How Dell hopes to ship your next server -- on mushrooms

Could a friendly fungus eventually eliminate styrofoam packaging?  Don't laugh, it just might.

FORTUNE -- If your job was to ship 250 pounds and $25,000 dollars worth of computer servers, you'd no doubt pack them in a box using only the safest materials.  And yet when Dell (DELL)  ships four of its PowerEdge R710 servers it will soon offer a new packaging made of...mushrooms.

The idea seems off-the-wall, but it also seems MORE

Dow's amazing $7 billion profit on green

The company learned they had to accurately account for saving money in order to understand how they profit from green investments. Once they did, the figures were staggering.

FORTUNE -- Making chemicals takes energy -- a lot of it -- so the mere fact that Dow Chemical (DOW) can save a lot of money by improving their energy efficiency is not what's surprising. It's just how much energy and cash they've MORE