Fun- Dr. Chuck @ CNN Reading the News

Reporting from CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta, I’m Charles Severance with a CNN News Update. In travel news, the US has places to escape civilization. When Americans ponder the world’s most desolate places, they tend to conjure Antarctic outposts, Tibetan mountaintops, or Central Australian plateaus. Fact is, if you’re in the States, you don’t have to travel halfway across the globe to separate yourself from civilization. You don’t even have to leave the continental United States. Secluded swamps, forsaken tundra, vacuous canyons, yonder mountain ranges, and deserted deserts, despite all of the development, the United States is still home to plenty of untamed hinterland. The criteria are as simple as they are vague. Maximum distance from other humans and any signs of their existence, including, but not limited to roads, posted signs, smoke stacks, government surveillance, electronic dance music, Snapchat, and cronuts. In entertainment news, the fated downtown of small town in Georgia made famous by an appearance on The Walking Dead, can now be yours for the right price. Nine buildings in downtown Grantville are for sale on Ebay, and the seller says it’s a bargain. Jim Sells, Grantville’s former mayor, bought the buildings in a foreclosure deal about four years ago during the recession. Sells and another investor are now putting them on the market for a starting bid of $680,000. The town was the setting for Clear, an episode in season three of the hit AMC television show, in which the protagonist Rick Grimes returns to his abandoned hometown to look for weapons. A Facebook page offers walking tours of the town’s filming locations. But soon, that won’t be Grantville’s only claim to fame, Sells says. The former mayor says four movies slated to be shot in Grantville in the upcoming months. In gaming news, in recent years, the gaming industry has seen a number of hyped trends come and go. Games on social networks, 3D gaming, systems that let you control in-game avatars by moving your body. Now get ready for another one, virtual reality. This technology, which plunges the headset wearer into three dimensional virtual worlds that feel incredibly lifelike, is coming soon to consumers everywhere according to the two companies spearheading the charge. But reps for both companies who spoke to CNN at last week’s E3 gaming show, say that the driving force between the success or failure of virtual reality, or VR, will be not their devices, but the games created for them. Both Oculus and Sony say that they are close to releasing consumer units, but neither would provide a timetable. However, they agree the headsets are useless without great content. People won’t wanna buy a VR headset if they can’t use it for a compelling game. And these games need to be ready to go when the headsets hit the market. And finally in world news, archaeologists searching for a lost city in the jungles of Honduras have discovered the urban remains of what they believe is a vanished ancient civilization. A writer and photographer accompanied a team of scientists to Honduras Mosquitia region on the trail of the legendary White City, or the city of the Monkey God. The expedition was launched after aerial light detection scanning known as LIDAR uncovered what appeared to be manmade structures below the rainforest. In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied, and it remains virtually unknown. The expedition found earthworks including an earthen pyramid, as well as a collection of stone sculptures. The Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History estimated that they dated from AD 1000 to 1400. The team left their finds unexcavated and are keeping the exact location of the site a secret in an attempt to prevent looting. The Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but doesn’t have the money. And that’s our report for now, for a check of the news any time of the day, just log on to our website at CNN.com. Reporting from the CNN center in Atlanta, I’m Charles Severance.