6:30PM EDT October 28. 2012 - A powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the west coast of Canada, triggering tsunami warnings for Hawaii

October 28, 2012 PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Hurricane Sandy is a HUGE storm, with a diameter of over 700 miles wide and a tropical storm wind field over 400 miles wide, meaning that it will impact a very large number of people for an extended period of time. Unlike many storms that move up the coast and are in and out quickly, Sandy will be arriving almost perpendicular to the New Jersey coastline, and then weakening, but dawdling as it moves inland. That means even in Philadelphia and the suburbs, tropical storm force winds could last over 48 hours! We still have the same expectations of Sandy’s impact: - 5-10″ of rain with the higher end of that spectrum occurring from the city on south into NJ and DE. - wind gusts over 60 mph in the city, over 70 mph down the shore. - major, possibly record, coastal flooding and storm surge in our shore communities. - widespread power outages and road closures.

Planet about 4 light-years away, unlikely to harbor life (or at least life as we know it) (CNN) - The hunt for planets like our own has come up with a striking discovery: There's a planet about the same size as Earth in the nearby Alpha Centauri system, and it's the closest planet found outside our solar system. "Close," of course, is a relative term. No one's getting there anytime soon: The newly found planet, which orbits a star called Alpha Centauri B, is about 4 light-years, or 23.5 trillion miles, away. Based on its mass, the planet is a rocky world and not gaseous, said Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. He and his colleagues published the findings in the journal Nature.

Marketwatch - Prepare yourself for another stock-market crash as damaging as that of Oct. 19, 1987, writes Mark Hulbert. At current levels, that would mean a single-session Dow decline of more than 3,000 points

Next weekend, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from Halley's Comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower. Forecasters expect 25 meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Oct. 21st.

MOSCOW -The Russian space program's Mission Control Center says it will move the International Space Station into a different orbit to avoid possible collision with a fragment of debris. Mission Control Center spokeswoman Nadyezhda Zavyalova said the Russian Zvevda module will fire booster rockets to carry out the operation Thursday at 07:22 a.m. Moscow time (0322 GMT). The space station performs evasive maneuvers when the likelihood of a collision exceeds one in 10,000. NASA estimates that more than 21,000 fragments of orbital debris larger than 10 centimeters (3.9 inches) are stuck in earth's orbit, and experts worry that orbiting junk is becoming a growing problem for the space industry. There are six astronauts -- three Russians, two Americans and one from Japan -- onboard the orbiting laboratory. http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/19722168/space-station-to-move-to-avoid-debris#ixzz28GsX6ZN9