TOYS WASHED OVERBOARD in a Central Pacific storm are helping oceanographers study the pathways of ocean currents. In January 1992, 29,000 small plastic bath toys fell from a foundering ship into the sea. Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer of Evans Hamilton, Inc. (Seattle) and W. James Ingraham of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have coordinated computer simulations with the actual recovery of some of the toys all along the Alaskan coast in the two years since the event. The same scientists performed a similar operation a few years before when 61,000 Nike shoes spilled from a boat into the Gulf of Alaska. (Eos, 13 Sept. 1994.)