Help | Cascade particle distribution parameter range

Hello, Ive recently started getting to grips with the cascade editor and one two problems which I cant seem to solve or google are

  1. I want to pass the particles lifetimes as a paramter, but when I do they all have EXACTLY the same lifetime, which is as expected, but looks really bad. So can I add some random variance into it?

  2. I have an explosion, and want to pass the initial velocity of the fragments as a parameter. However, I can only pass one value, meanwhile the velocities need to take both negative and positive values, also with a random factor up to the parameter value in absolute. Is this achievable?

Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you in advance