Israeli and Japanese researchers are teaming on a project to learn how autistic spectrum disorder develops in the brain.

The prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders has been steadily rising; in most parts of the world rates as high as 1 percent are reported, including in the United States. In Israel, previously reported prevalence rates have been in the 0.2 percent rage and were  based on parental reporting of diagnosis. However, they too appear to be rising.

The scientists met together at a conference that convened following a visit to Israel by japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

A group of leading Japanese scientists arrived at the Weizmann Institute of Science late last week  to attend the Advances in Brain Sciences conference, which was  was jointly hosted by Weizmann in Rehovot and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan.

Weizmann’s conference co-organizer Dr. Ofer Yizhar is currently involved in the collaborative research project with RIKEN researcher Toru Takumi. The joint project is aimed at determining which neural mechanisms are involved in autistic spectrum disorder behaviorisms, Yizhar explained.

“Takumi creates mice that have a genetic defect which mimics autism,” he explained, “while my optogenetics lab can work with these mice, turning neurons in the brain ‘on’ and ‘off’ with light.”

There were a number of other presentations at the conference as well.

Keynote speaker Professor Shimon Ullman (Weizmann) spoke on visual recognition, a subject that crosses the boundaries between neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Ullman has worked with RIKEN’s Dr. Manabu Tanifuji for a number of years. “Scientificc and personal connections have deepened over the years,” he said, “and we are currently planning the next steps of joint work in the future.”

In 2010, prevalence rates for autistic spectrum disorders in Israel were found to be 0.65 percent in eight year old children, and 0.48 percent in children ages 1 to 12, per 1,000 children, according to an article published in 2013 in the Journal of Autism and Development Disorders.

The article, entitled ‘Prevalence and incidence of autism spectrum disorder in an Israeli population, listed the findings of a study of records from the Maccabi Health Maintenance Organization (HMO / kupat holim) Child Neurology and Development, Child Development Center, Jerusalem and Shfela District.

A Canada-Israel Autism Research Symposium was also held for the first time last March at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, jointly sponsored by the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Research Hub at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada and the Canadian Friends of The Hebrew University.

Kaplan Hospital in Rechovot has begun moving patients from the intensive care and cardiac units to bomb shelters, in accordance with the health ministry.

The hospital also announced that dialysis patients will now be received at HaSharon Hospital in Petah Tikva.

As Gaza terrorists rev up the missile machine and target cities in central Israel, and Israel ramps up its response in Operation Protective Edge, some residents were forced on Monday to make the run to their bomb shelters for the first time.

In Rehovot, Michal J. had already put their small children to bed and was beginning to wind down when the Color Red incoming rocket alert siren activated at 8:20 p.m.

It’s an incredibly loud sound, a rising wail, and it can be really frightening for someone who has never heard it before.

“Michal quickly rushed all the kids out of bed and down to the shelter, baby Chaya in one arm and Shloime in the other,” her husband Eli said. “They heard some distant thuds and booms and came back upstairs safe and sound,” with the two older children initially excited by the exercise, but 2-year-old Shloime “rather shaken and clingy.”

Eli arrived home from work a few minutes later, and went to relieve a friend’s babysitter who was “ordered home by her mother. What a mess!” he wrote on his Facebook page. He later added that his own older son could not fall asleep following the experience, and both older children came to their parents in the middle of the night, saying they were scared.

“This morning Shloime kept saying, over and over, ‘When we hear the noise, we go to the Miklat (shelter) and then we’re safe,” he added.

“To think that this is our family’s trauma from just one siren, when there are kids in Sderot and the surrounding area that have grown up with this their whole lives… What kind of normal country would allow her citizens to live in such terror without doing anything about it?? Is there any precedent for such a thing in world history?”

Across the country, in a Jerusalem suburb, small children in another family slept through the entire experience, but woke briefly to express annoyance at being moved from their beds. For their parents, however, it wasn’t as simple of course.

“I was out walking with the wife and we luckily stopped to talk with a neighbor a few houses away,” related Steve L. “The siren went off and we ran for our lives. As soon as we reached our house, we grabbed each kid out of various beds – we have four, ranging in age from a year to 9 – and carried them to the bomb shelter in our home.”

Steve said that he realized his children were “heavier than I remember.” As did Eli, he hit the social media when the incident was over to post about his experience.

His children, however, were “annoyed the siren woke them and that we made them switch beds. They went back to sleep.” He added that the bomb shelter “gets very hot when the window and door are closed. I was annoyed that I didn’t grab my computer too. I felt stuck there, that I couldn’t go out. But it’s not our first missile run.”

In the Gaza Belt community of Sderot, sadly, residents have endured so many rocket attacks that a fortified playground was donated to the city, where children can play safely in what is essentially a mammoth bomb shelter.