A FAMILY history website is offering the ultimate in social networking - the chance to track down unknown relatives using DNA tests.

Ancestry.co.uk has launched a new service that promises to help people identify living genetic cousins and learn about their distant ancestors’ roots.

The results will be stored anonymously on a database and future matches will be flagged up automatically.

The website plans to allow users to create ‘DNA groups’ so that people sharing the same surname can use their genetic test results to find out if they are related.

Ancestry’s chief family historian, Megan Smolenyak, said: “DNA testing in family history is reaching a critical mass. As more people add their results, Ancestry’s DNA database will become a powerful asset for users to make connections and discover their family tree.”

Ancestry - which claims 15 million registered users worldwide - is offering three different DNA tests.

A paternal lineage test, analysing the Y-chromosome DNA which is passed virtually unchanged between father and son, costs 74.

This test, which is not available to women because they do not have a Y-chromosome, can confirm a shared ancestor in past generations and predict ancient origins.

For 99, site users can obtain a more comprehensive version of the same test, and for 89 they can undergo a maternal lineage test.

NECKER ISLAND,British Virgin Islands: Richard Branson was lounging under the starry midnight sky on this palm-dappled speck of an island recently when he popped a sobering question.

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio.

What he wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet.

Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Some of them, like Page, carbon-consciously jet-pooled in from Silicon Valley, where the financiers who bankrolled the Web boom of the 1990s have started chasing the new “New New Thing”: green power. In an era of $100-plus oil, venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, another invitee, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into young companies that cook up biofuels and harness the power of the sun.

Blair, who is now a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase, squeezed in a few idyllic days here between assignments (he left early for Jerusalem). Another attendee only sort-of showed up. The Medusa, the 198-foot yacht owned by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, was moored off Necker Island all weekend, but Allen never came ashore.

The Caribbean getaway was the brainchild of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur. Stromback, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, joked that a gathering like this might seem nefarious to some people.

“In James Bond movies, evil-doers meet in exotic settings to plot the destruction of the planet,” Stromback said, puffing on a cigar before dinner one night. But the people here, he said, were plotting to save the planet.

So far, however, the hopes and dreams of alternative energy have far outstripped reality. But for Stromback and many of the other participants, a confluence of two powerful forces - soaring oil prices and growing concern over global warming - means the era of economically viable green power is finally at hand.

Many executives and financiers, including some in attendance at the retreat, have a lot of money riding on global warming. Branson, for example, has invested in a host of alternative energy enterprises, including existing businesses within his sprawling Virgin Group.

Khosla, the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, has at least 33 investments in the clean-tech, including new fermentation technology to make fuel-grade ethanol.

Much of the weekend was spent hashing over ideas in Bransons new open-air yoga pavilion. Talk ranged from the practicality of electric-powered cars to how much money would have to be invested in biofuels to reduce the price of crude to $35 a barrel, a prospect Khosla said was possible within the next 15 years.

But the big question that hung over the meeting was whether the nations or the world could ever work together to tackle climate change and emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

“We have an agreement that there should be an agreement,” said Blair, who was dressed in a white polo shirt, blue cargo shorts and sneakers. “But theres no agreement on what that agreement should be.”

Blair predicted that the United States would soon adopt a so-called cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, as the European Union has done with mixed success. “Im a little skeptical that it will work unless its part of a global deal,” he added.

As an alternative, Shai Agassi, the former president of SAPs product and technology group, suggested having companies buy carbon insurance. Insurance companies, after all, price all kinds of risks. “They know how to put a price on it better than the bookies,” said Agassi, whose start-up, Better PLC of Palo Alto, California, has been trying to create the infrastructure to operate a countrywide fleet of electric vehicles in Israel.

Everyone, it seemed, had some project in the works. Elon Musk, the co-founder of Paypal, talked about his latest project, Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes sexy electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. Page has ordered one.

D. Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of the synthetic fuel technology company Rentech, talked about his plans to make biofuels for airplanes. William McDonough, the designer, showed off pictures of some of his latest projects: a building in Abu Dhabi with solar panels built into the windows, and a Wal-Mart distribution center with an energy-friendly grass roof.

FRANKFURT: European central banks injected piles of fresh cash into the financial system Thursday in an attempt to get nervous banks through the Easter holiday weekend.

On top of adding more liquidity, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, brought Britains top bankers into a closed-door session to discuss ways to restore “more orderly” market conditions.

The Bank of England described the meeting as routine, but it was only called last week - and comes a day after the central bank took the unusual step of publicly slapping down rumors of a brewing disaster among British banks.

That came in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns in the United States, the latest victim of the credit crunch that began last summer.

But the crisis showed no sign of ending Thursday. Europes first major victim, IKB Deutsche Industriebank, on Thursday announced new writeoffs linked to its investments in mortgage-backed securities in the United States, and said it would lose nearly \1 billion this year.

The European Central Bank surprised markets with a \15 billion infusion of extra loans that banks can use to firm up balance sheets over the holiday weekend. It is also a prelude to end-of-quarter accounting, a time when demand for cash typically rises.

The ECB also went through with a $15 billion cash auction, part of previously scheduled currency swap agreement with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

For its part, the Bank of England loaned 5 billion.

Money markets, the short-term lending pool that banks tap for day-to-day operations, have turned especially tight in the last few weeks, with pressures rising to levels not seen since late last year.

The rate for three-month loans among banks rose to 4.67 percent in the euro area, reflecting the extreme caution that has gripped lenders around the world and led to a credit squeeze for the broader economy in the United States but not - so far - in continental Europe.

King, head of the British central bank, met with chief executives from Britains five largest banks - Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, HSBC, Barclays and HBOS - to discuss whether the British central bank should do more to strengthen lenders financial position.

But in a statement issued afterward, the central bank gave few details about what was discussed.

“The Bank of England and the banks agreed to continue their close dialogue with the objective of restoring more orderly market conditions,” it said.

British banks have long argued that central banks should accept more kinds of securities as collateral for lending, a step that would allow the banks to offload investments of questionable value. The Bank of England has resisted such steps, arguing that central banks, and by extension taxpayers, should not assume the risks that banks willingly incurred.

Taxpayers are on the hook already in Germany, where IKB, the tiny German lender whose near-collapse last summer heralded the beginning of the financial crisis in Europe, warned it would have to write off another \590 million thanks to rapidly deteriorating market conditions.

IKBs principal shareholder, the state-owned banking group KfW, will kick in \450 million from a previously arranged credit line to recapitalize the bank, which has needed repeated bailouts to stay afloat over the last six months. IKB also announced it would post an \800 million loss for the fiscal year ending March 31, and make little or no profit in the coming years.

Dьsseldorf-based IKB speculated heavily in securities linked to the crisis-ridden U.S. mortgage market, to an extent that far outstripped the banks capacity for surviving significant market disruptions.

In mid-February, with KfWs ability to support IKB without harming its other activities increasingly in doubt, the German government stepped with a \1 billion payment to keep the bank afloat. A consortium of private banks, worried about the overall effect on the financial system, also kicked into what was by then the third bailout package.

IKBs troubles have had a political resonance in Germany, where criticism of the packaged hammered out last month was fierce. “There must be no further money from the federal budget,” Steffen Kampeter, budget policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative Christian Democrats, told Reuters on Thursday.

Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, made waves in Germany earlier this week with his call for greater government action to wind down a financial crisis that has gathered momentum in recent weeks. “I no longer believe in the markets self-healing power,” Ackermann said.

He was quickly slapped down by Axel Weber, the president of the German Bundesbank, who said that the burden was on banks to come clean about their bad investments.