1. Have a look at the timer behaviour.
2. The position of your mouse is mouse.x,mouse.y pop up your menu's relative to that.
3. search the forums for many zoom examples, some of them might suit you.
4. Read up about movement in the manual and or tutorials. You could for instance try adding an event for changing directions if you want total control over the effect.
5. An instance value can hold many different values under the same name, so population would be the name and the value itself could be 100 or 1000 or 10000 or even 264.75 ..
You should probably follow some more tutorials and read the manual more intensively. Using the search feature this forum has could also help. Also there is this topic called FAQ, which means frequently asked questions, many basic (and not so basic) features are in the topics linked in that topic.