Life

The oxygen-hydrogen bonds in water are very polar. Because of the arrangement of the two bonds and two lone pairs of electrons on the oxygen, the molecule is bent. (The four sets of electrons are arranged in a tetrahedral arrangement. The angles between these sets of electrons are about 108 degrees) This bent shape makes water polar. Since it is polar (actually very polar) there are considerable intermolecular forces attracting the molecules of water together. The result of these forces is that water boils at a much higher temperature than would be expected of a molecule of its molecular weight. If it were not so polar, water would be a gas a normal temperatures, just as methane, CH4, and ammonia, NH3, are gases.A molecule is an aggregation of atomic nuclei and electrons that is sufficiently stable to possess observable properties — and there are few molecules that are more stable and difficult to decompose than H2O. In water, each hydrogen nucleus is bound to the central oxygen atom by a pair of electrons that are shared between them; chemists call this shared electron pair a covalent chemical bond. In H2O, only two of the six outer-shell electrons of oxygen are used for this purpose, leaving four electrons which are organized into two non-bonding pairs. The four electron pairs surrounding the oxygen tend to arrange themselves as far from each other as possible in order to minimize repulsions between these clouds of negative charge. This would ordinarly result in a tetrahedral geometry in which the angle between electron pairs (and therefore the H-O-H bond angle) is 109.5°. However, because the two non-bonding pairs remain closer to the oxygen atom, these exert a stronger repulsion against the two covalent bonding pairs, effectively pushing the two hydrogen atoms closer together. The result is a distorted tetrahedral arrangement in which the H—O—H angle is 104.5°.
Although the water molecule carries no net electric charge, its eight electrons are not

References: (click on image for enlarged view) The Southern California dream— or is it a myth? A bigger splash by David Hockney, 1967. (click on image for enlarged view) John Biglin in a Single Scull (1873) by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).