Atherosclerosis remains a major driver for cardiovascular disease (CVD), despite advancements in traditional risk factor management therapies. Recent evidence emphasizes the crucial role of the gut microbiome in the progression of atherosclerosis and plaque rupture, highlighting a promising therapeutic avenue. This review focuses on the intertwined relationship between the gut microbiome, its metabolites, and atherosclerosis and CVD, also highlighting the potential therapeutic role of probiotics and prebiotics. Given the diverse and unique gut microbiota signatures among individuals, a one-size-fits-all therapeutic approach is unlikely to be effective. Personalized treatment strategies are therefore necessary. Here we discussed how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to analyze individual gut microbiome profiles from microbiome sequencing, predict treatment response, and optimize therapeutic strategies based on individual patients which would significantly improve outcomes of the treatment for atherosclerosis/CVD patients.

Ransomware is still one of the most serious cybersecurity threats. Victims often pay but fail to regain access to their data, while also facing the danger of losing data privacy. These uncertainties heavily shape the attacker-victim dynamics in decision-making. In this paper, we introduce and analyze zkRansomware. This new ransomware model integrates zero-knowledge proofs to enable verifiable data recovery and uses smart contracts to enforce multi-round payments while mitigating the risk of data disclosure and privacy loss. We show that zkRansomware is technically feasible using existing cryptographic and blockchain tools and, perhaps counterintuitively, can align incentives between the attacker and the victim. Finally, we develop a theoretical decision-making framework for zkRansomware that distinguishes it from known ransomware decision models and discusses its implications for ransomware risk analysis and response decision support.