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Our 10 Most Underrated Pat Benatar Songs list presents a collection of songs that we feel have kind of floated under the radar over the years in Pat Benatar’s catalog. Pat Benatar stands as one of the most highly successful rock and roll artists of all time. Born in 1953, she first hit the scene in 1979 with her debut album In the Heat of the Night. This is an album that blew a lot of our minds, based on the hit single “Heartbreaker.” She wasn’t the first female rocker, far from it, but she was definitely one of the The post 10 Most Underrated Pat Benatar Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd has been celebrating the music of the blues both on stage and in the studio for over thirty years. After meeting the legendary Stevie Ray Vaughan when Kenny was only seven years old, Kenny Wayne Shepherd had become infatuated with the blues and has since dedicated his life to keeping the music relevant to a new generation of music fans while also having great commercial success as a blues artist. In an era in which hip-hop and rap have ruled the airwaves, Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s commercial success as a blues artist is even more impressive. Inspired by The post Kenny Wayne Shepherd: The ClassicRockHistory.com Interview appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Key Dems, Donors Declaring Independence from Biden?

Up until last month, Japan had 1,035 regulations that involved the use of floppy disks, storage devices that can only fit a couple of megabytes of data at best. The Japanese government has finally got rid of them – now there is only one regulation that uses them, concerning vehicle recycling. Spearheading this initiative is the Digital Minister Taro Kono. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that reliance on paper filling and outdated technology was a hindrance to the rollout of contact tracing apps and digital identification. The Digital Agency was set up in 2021 to push antiquated technology out of government, such as fax machines and floppy disks."We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Kono told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.The last producer of floppy disks, Sony, stopped manufacturing them in 2011. It is high time that the reliance on this tech was taken seriously in Japan – but the country is not alone in reliance on old tech. Public organizations, governments, universities, and scientific experiments often rely on established tech in their system, even when the rest of the world has moved on.Many universities have stories of expensive experiments running on operating systems that have not seen an update in a decade. But if we want to stick to floppy disks, there are two big examples to mention beyond Japan. British Airways' Boeing 747-400 fleet used floppy disks for its avionics software all the way to their retirement in 2020. Also, the US military stopped using floppy disks to control its nuclear weapons only in 2019.It is believed that the sales of the device will continue for several more years, despite it being abandoned almost everywhere. And even when long forgotten, it will remain as the symbol of the save button. That makes it a virtual "skeuomorph" - something retaining the ornamental value of a physical object that is no longer in use. 

Whether you prefer briefs, a thong, or even a jockstrap, the garments with which you furnish your undercarriage may descend from an ancestral pair of undies that were first worn in a chilly Siberian cave 40,000 years ago. At least, that’s the conclusion of a new analysis of the world’s earliest eyed sewing needles, which date back to the Last Glacial Maximum in the famous Denisova Cave.As the researchers point out, humans had been tailoring clothing using bone awls – which are essentially eyeless needles – since at least 70,000 years ago. The later production of eyed needles, however, would have been a highly labor-intensive process for ancient hunter-gatherers, raising questions as to why they would bother going to all that trouble when awls were perfectly sufficient for manufacturing basic outfits.Tellingly, the appearance of these more sophisticated sewing tools at the Denisova cave – which was occupied by Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans over a period of around 100,000 years – coincides with a drastic drop in global temperatures during the Ice Age. As the freeze set in, people may have needed to wear more layers, and the production of eyed needles may have allowed for “more refined, efficient sewing,” thus facilitating the creation of life-saving underwear.“The effectiveness of adding extra layers to improve insulation derives from the basic thermal principle of clothing, namely, trapping air near the skin surface to reduce the rate of convective heat loss,” write the study authors. “An association between eyed needles and a physiological need for more thermally effective fitted clothing is apparent,” they continue, adding that “a link with underwear has been posited.”Sadly, however, they concede that “despite the logic, convincing evidence for underwear in the late Pleistocene is scant.”Adding an extra layer to their theory, the researchers go on to say that the need to cover up would have limited possibilities for self-expression through body decoration. Prior to this point in history, humans tended to embellish their skin with red ocher, tattoos, and deliberate scarring for a variety of symbolic purposes, none of which would have been visible through clothing.The researchers therefore suggest that eyed sewing needles might also have allowed ancient humans to create more elaborate clothing, enabling them to express themselves and communicate through fashion instead of body art. “Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,” explained study author Dr Ian Gilligan in a statement.  “Eyed needles would have been especially useful for the very fine sewing that was required to decorate clothing.”In their write-up, the researchers speculate that such decorations may have involved the attachment of shell beads or fur trims to animal-hide garments.“The benefits of manufacturing eyed needles – facilitating finer sewing by hand and rendering the task of sewing more efficient – may pertain to adornment of clothes and also the need for underwear in multilayered garment assemblages,” they write.“These two different purposes actually coincide, since the thermal need for underwear corresponds to a more complete and continuous use of clothing, which, in turn, would favor a shift from decorating the skin surface to adorning the more visible surface of clothes,” add the study authors. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

On June 27, asteroid 2011 UL21 made a relatively close encounter with Earth, flying by our planet at a distance of 6.6 million kilometers (4.1 million miles), or roughly 17 times the average distance from the Earth to the Moon.While not close enough to worry about, the encounter gave astronomers an opportunity to get a closer look at the object. Doing so can help us learn more about such asteroids, as well as narrow down their orbit, allowing us to know whether they will pose risks to the planet further in the future. “The term ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroid’ (PHA) is a precise formal definition, referring to minor planets larger than approximately 140 meters [459 feet] that can come within 7.5 million km [4.6 million miles] from the Earth,” Gianluca Masi, astrophysicist and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project, said in a statement ahead of the flyby. “In other words, only the largest asteroids capable of approaching close enough to our planet are flagged as PHAs, which does not mean they are going to hit the Earth, but they nonetheless warrant a better monitoring.”During this year's flyby, NASA's Deep Space Network’s Goldstone planetary radar kept a close watch on 2011 UL21, imaging it seven times as it passed at 25 kilometers (16 miles) per second. This was the first chance that NASA had to image the asteroid using radar, and when they did so they discovered the asteroid is actually a binary system. The asteroid has its own moonlet, orbiting at a distance of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers).“It is thought that about two-thirds of asteroids of this size are binary systems, and their discovery is particularly important because we can use measurements of their relative positions to estimate their mutual orbits, masses, and densities, which provide key information about how they may have formed,” Lance Benner, principal scientist at JPL who helped lead the observations, said in a statement.The moonlet can be seen at the bottom of these radar images.NASA/JPL-CaltechDuring the approach, NASA discovered that the asteroid is roughly spherical. Prior to radar imaging, there was uncertainty about the object's size, with estimates suggesting it could be as small as 1.7 kilometers and as large as 3.9 kilometers (1.05 to 2.4 miles). After radar imaging, NASA puts its size at nearly 1 mile wide (1.5 kilometers) wide, so a little smaller than expected.It was actually a pretty busy week for the radar system, which observes space objects by transmitting radio waves and then receiving the reflected signal back to the same antenna. On June 29, a second object – only discovered on June 16 – made a much closer approach, passing within 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers) of Earth. That's a little over three-quarters of the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, a pretty close approach by the asteroid provisionally named 2024 MK. Asteroid 2024 MK, tumbling through space.Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"For these observations, the scientists also used DSS-14 to transmit radio waves to the object, but they used Goldstone’s 114-foot (34-meter) DSS-13 antenna to receive the signal that bounced off the asteroid and came back to Earth," NASA explained. "The result of this 'bistatic' radar observation is a detailed image of the asteroid’s surface, revealing concavities, ridges, and boulders about 30 feet (10 meters) wide."The asteroid's path was altered slightly by Earth's gravity, shortening its 3.3-year orbit around the Sun by about 24 days. The asteroid, which was discovered by NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) just 13 days before its closest approach, is classed as potentially hazardous. However, calculations of its orbit show that it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.