The ability to “turn the lights on” to directly see the molecular machinery of life fundamentally changes how we understand and manipulate biology. One such material that is so fundamental to how the molecular machinery of life operates, in what way molecules interact, assemble and perform biological processes, but is exceptionally difficult to characterize, is water. Water has properties of a molecule and a material, it is a liquid with fluid properties, but it also has structure; in fact it adopts multiple structures in solutions of your favorite protein. After all, you can drink structured water! I will demonstrate that NMR spectroscopy of 1H and 17O is a powerful technique to unambiguously identify the dynamical, structural, and thermodynamical property of water that varies depending on the surface chemistry and topology of the dissolved biological macromolecules. However, to successfully use NMR to characterize the varying shapes of water on biomolecular surfaces, we had to use some old tricks that were forgotten. One is 1H NMR Overhauser dynamic nuclear polarization at 0.35 Tesla that exploits the dipolar coupling-driven electron-nuclear (e-n) cross relaxation whose efficiency is exquisitely dependent on the rate of water movement near an electron spin label that needs to be of the order of the EPR frequency for e-n coupling to occur, and hence is sensitive to the translational dynamics of surface water within 1 nm of a biomolecular surface. The other is 17O NMR chemical shift of water that is known to be exquisitely sensitive to the structure of water as defined by the hydrogen bond angle and length in crystals, but few people believed that such shift can be used in solution state if the rate of exchange can be slowed down, but we show that it can. New insight on the structure of water can be gained by 17O NMR in solution and solid state upon vitrification. I will share results on rationally tuning the surface activity of silica catalyst surfaces by considering the shape of water as part of the design criteria, our discovery of surprising structure forming effects exerted by commonly used small molecule solutes and the role of structured water on ice binding molecules in imparting their ice binding, antifreeze and ice recrystallization inhibition functions.