On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. For the infectious disease, cold asian noodle salad Common cold. An iceberg, which is commonly associated with cold.

Goose bumps, a common physiological response to cold, aiming to reduce the loss of body heat in a cold environment. A photograph of the snow surface at Dome C Station, Antarctica a part of the notoriously cold Polar Plateau, it is representative of the majority of the continent’s surface. Cold is the presence of low temperature, especially in the atmosphere. In common usage, cold is often a subjective perception.

A lower bound to temperature is absolute zero, defined as 0. K on the Kelvin scale, an absolute thermodynamic temperature scale. F on the Fahrenheit scale, and 0. Since temperature relates to the thermal energy held by an object or a sample of matter, which is the kinetic energy of the random motion of the particle constituents of matter, an object will have less thermal energy when it is colder and more when it is hotter. Cooling refers to the process of becoming cold, or lowering in temperature.

This could be accomplished by removing heat from a system, or exposing the system to an environment with a lower temperature. Coolants are fluids used to cool objects, prevent freezing and prevent erosion in machines. Air cooling is the process of cooling an object by exposing it to air. This will only work if the air is at a lower temperature than the object, and the process can be enhanced by increasing the surface area, increasing the coolant flow rate, or decreasing the mass of the object. Another common method of cooling is exposing an object to ice, dry ice, or liquid nitrogen. Laser cooling and magnetic evaporative cooling are techniques used to reach very low temperatures. In ancient times, ice was not adopted for food preservation but used to cool wine which the Romans had also done.

According to Pliny, Emperor Nero invented the ice bucket to chill wines instead of adding it to wine to make it cold as it would dilute it. Some time around 1700 BC Zimri-Lim, king of Mari Kingdom in northwest Iraq had created an “icehouse” called bit shurpin at a location close to his capital city on the banks of the Euphrates. In the 7th century BC the Chinese had used icehouses to preserve vegetables and fruits. Shachtman says that in the 4th century AD, the brother of the Japanese emperor Nintoku gave him a gift of ice from a mountain. The Emperor was so happy with the gift that he named the first of June as the “Day of Ice” and ceremoniously gave blocks of ice to his officials. Even in ancient times, Shachtman says, in Egypt and India, night cooling by evaporation of water and heat radiation, and the ability of salts to lower the freezing temperature of water was practiced. Shachtman says that King James VI and I supported the work of Cornelis Drebbel as a magician to perform tricks such as producing thunder, lightning, lions, birds, trembling leaves and so forth.

In 1620 he gave a demonstration in Westminster Abbey to the king and his courtiers on the power of cold. Shachtman says it was the lack of scientific knowledge in physics and chemistry that had held back progress in the beneficial use of ice until a drastic change in religious opinions in the 17th century. The intellectual barrier was broken by Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle who followed him in this quest for knowledge of cold. In the United States from about 1850 till end of 19th century export of ice was second only to cotton. The first ice box was developed by Thomas Moore, a farmer from Maryland in 1810 to carry butter in an oval shaped wooden tub.

The tub was provided with a metal lining in its interior and surrounded by a packing of ice. A rabbit skin was used as insulation. Iceboxes were in widespread use from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, when the refrigerator was introduced into the home. Most municipally consumed ice was harvested in winter from snow-packed areas or frozen lakes, stored in ice houses, and delivered domestically as iceboxes became more common.