RATHER LIKE a kangaroo on speed, scientific progress is proceeding by grand leaps and bounds these days, and I am particularly intrigued by research in two areas. Namely, why toast tends to land butterside down and why cats purr.

Scoff ye not. If you were owned by three cats with bottomless pits for stomachs and a wife whose main use for bread is in the manufacture of sliced charcoal, you would understand my occasional preoccupation with such matters.

Anyway, we already have the nuclear bomb to blow our derrieres back to primordial soup, computers are there to help the tax folk help themselves to more of our hard-earned and geneticists are about to give us tomatoes with teeth and ingrown toenails, so we need to look elsewhere for worthwhile worries.

The kitchen is always a good place to start, what with its reputation for harboring germs that can cause anything from salmonella to e-coli epidemics and, for all I know, anal aneurysms and hiatus hernias. The place is a veritable playground for the Devil.

Not that any bug has any chance around my wife Elizabeth, unless its suicidal tendencies run to death by incineration. Mind you, she's a grand cook in most respects. The exception is toast, which in her hands tends to turn out rather like sandpaper in very dark distress.

So neither of us can afford to waste toast when it occasionally turns out right, as most assuredly would be the case when it is dropped on the floor once it is buttered. And in my experience, the bloody slices almost always land buttered side down, - if possible, on any loose bits of cat fur lurking about.

Why this should be so is one of life's deeper mysteries, along with how do athletes' foot germs stand the smell, which is the right way to run up the British flag and whatever happened to Judge Crater.

One explanation is that falling toast operates according to Murphy's Law - a rule often applicable to space shots, marriage and cooking eggs Benedict - which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Now a bunch of London school kids armed with five loaves of bread and a large vat of margarine are out to prove it one way or the other. They are toasting the bread, buttering it and then dropping each slice on the floor 20 times. Then they are repeating the test using unbuttered toast with the letter "B" written on one side with marker pens.

Several questions immediately come to mind. Why use margarine instead of butter? Isn't dropping the stuff on the floor 20 times going to do something to the flavor? And just what does marker pen ink taste like anyway?

Anyway, says Robert Matthews, a physicist, the kids found that 75 percent of the slices landed butterside down. More such tests are under way in what he says is "by far and away the biggest examination ever made of Murphy's Law."

Then Matthews adds, "I wouldn't be surprised if it went terribly wrong." Well, that's a lot of help. What I'm left with is the threat that what few pieces of unburned but buttered toast left in the Webb kitchen have a good chance of landing the wrongside down on a dingy floor and that there's no scientific explanation for it.

Scientists seem to think they have a better handle on cat purring, which has been something of a mystery to me all my feline-owning life. I've always thought the little buggers generated these odd noises to bribe mushy, sentimental humans into stuffing them with fish, shrimp, steak and the occasional dollop of caviar - anything, in fact, that is expensive and does not bear the label "cat food."

Not a bit of it, the scientific set says. These learned folk say purrs are a "natural healing mechanism" that has helped inspire the myth that cats have nine lives. (I dispute the "myth" part, but that's the stripe of a different cat.)

Anyway, according to the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina, the key is the frequency of the purr - 27 to 44 hertz, or cycles per second. Other research, they say, shows that exposure to frequencies of 20 to 50 hertz strengthens human bones and helps them to grow.

Says Dr. Elizabeth von Muggenthaler (no, I'm not making this up), the institute's president: "Old wives' tales usually have a grain of truth behind them, and cats do heal very quickly. The healing power of purring seems to explain their 'nine lives'."

"We are starting to solve a 3,000-year-old mystery as to why cats purr," she insists. "The next phase will be to explain the mechanics of the process."

An English chappie, Dr. David Ourdie of Hull University, allows as how purring "could be the cat's way of providing stimulation for its own bones," and he suggests that it might be possible to build a gadget that could produce mechanical cat purrs that could help strengthen elderly human bones.

If there's any truth whatsoever to this, I should by now have bones with the approximate strength of pre-stressed concrete. My little tabby cat Currant Bun has spent the better part of his 14 years loudly purring into my left ear between 3:10 and 6:05 for about 20 minutes each and every morning.

He was, of course, healing his bones. Or maybe mine. And here I was thinking he was hoping I'd climb out of bed at this ungodly hour and produce some delicious morsel to replace the hated "cat food" still in the bowl from last night.

Or maybe it's in a cat's perverse nature to enjoy being yelled at in the darkness.

Whatever, Currant Bun and the other two, Ali Magraw and Teddy Bear, can purr to their heart's content until 6:15. Then they are welcome to share in the burned toast. Or lick the butter off the floor.

Thought for the Week: Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what in the hell happened.

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