The most important piece of health advice I think the most important piece of health advice for most people alive today is one that might sound rather strange: to contribute to the advancement of ageing biology. Successfully turning ideas in the lab into treatments for ageing is likely to be the single most important thing our generation can do to ensure that we, our friends and families, and people around the world can enjoy longer, healthier lives. If you’d like to help, I’ve got two suggestions: first, write to your political representatives (your MP in the UK, your Congresspeople and Senators in the US, and so on) explaining the importance of funding biogerontology research to both health and economic prosperity; and second, if you want to directly support research, I’ve made a list of charitable organisations who are performing research into ageing biology. This isn’t a complete list, so if you have any suggestions, please get in touch by email to let me know what I’ve missed or, even better, help me improve this page on collaborative editor HackMD! Tell your politicians about biogerontology Wherever you are in the world, you can write to politicians that represent you to tell them about the huge potential of ageing biology—and that, to secure your vote, they would do well to invest in it.

Controls Cascading properties from a control layer to the current layer AE’s frustrating lack of global variables means that it’s sometimes necessary to cascade eg a slider control from a master control null layer to the current layer. The advantage of this is that you can then copy and paste expressions between layers that need to behave in the same way. For example, if you wanted the speed of two planets, Mercury and Venus, to be set by sliders in the control layer, you could put a slider called 'speed' inside the Mercury and Venus layers which simply copied the value from 'Mercury speed' and 'Venus speed' in the control layer. This is a general implementation of that. For a slider called 'speed', it will find a slider in the control layer called 'Foo speed' where 'Foo' is the first word of the current layer’s name. (This allows you to have multiple layers called things like 'Foo green' and 'Foo blue' which share properties, but will only use the first word when looking for the control.) thisComp.layer("controls").effect(thisLayer.name.split(" ")[0] + " " + thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).name)("Slider"); Dropdown menus