Can we give off cold energy in the same or similar manner we give off heat?
If by “give off cold energy” you mean “absorb thermal energy from the environment, thus lowering its temperature,” then the answer is yes.
There’s no such thing as “cold energy.”
Our bodies give off heat, and we also generate electricity.
You know how in comics and in sci-fi you have thermodynamic characters who generate ice? Or how Superman uses his breath to freeze things?
I don’t necessarily mean to a superhuman degree like that but our bodies can’t generate cold at all?
I think we’re being wooshed… but in case we’re not…
No, you don’t Generate Cold, period. You absorb heat.
If your body temperature is higher than the surrounding area, you’ll radiate heat and cool down. If your body temperature is lower than the surrounding area, the ambient heat will raise your body temperature.
Your body has certain internal mechanisms for heat regulation, like sweating, which helps your body radiate heat much faster.
I do not understand? Why is this relevant?
The same way he uses his powers to fly.
However, if you had to ascribe a specific effect to Superman’s power (Ice Breathe), I’d go with Wind Chill.
“Cold” is just the absence of heat in the way that darkness is the absence of light. You can’t “create” darkness either, just block light. Cold and dark is our universe’s natural, baseline state of being. Heat and light, which are the only things that actually “exist”, are the byproduct of stars.
Superheros, comic book characters, and Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat’s “cold energy powers” are all derivatives of the power of the human imagination.
The questioner seems sincere to me, but I’d be more dubious if I hadn’t watched a recent Nova documentary on the scientific history of temperature (Absolute Zero) and learned that it wasn’t very long ago that even knowledgeable people thought cold was a force or substance in and of itself rather than simply the lack of heat…
It’s so sad to see yet another person fooled by photonist dogma.
This is the truth.
Actually, for the OPs benefit: the above is not the truth.
Everything that is not at absolute zero radiates heat. The only reason we perceive a cold object as such is because it radiates so much less heat than its surroundings do. It’s as if you had an array of 100 watt light bulbs with one 10 watt bulb in the center. You’d see the spot as dark, although it still radiates light.
It seems like a semantic trick but it’s really true: there is no such thing as darkness, and there is no such thing as cold. These are words to describe a condition where we notice that there’s something missing. Darkness refers to the condition where there is no light. Light is something. Heat is something. (Both are forms of energy.) And when we are in a situation that we notice that there isn’t much, we say that the condition has the quality of coldness. But that’s just a simple word for “lack of heat.” The more heat a situation lacks, the more “cold” it seems to possess. Same thing goes for light/dark. When we say something is totally dark, we mean there is a total absense of light.
Whether cold is a thing or not depends on what you think “thing” means. I give “thing” a great deal of latitude. We frequently use “thing” to refer to, well, things that don’t have a physical form or substance per se.
Human bodies generate heat. But, if you are outdoors in winter and your body gets pretty chilled, and you walk into a warm house, you absorb heat from the house and cool things you go near.
You can also radiate this effect, or, more precisely, objects that have a view of one another are always exchanging heat through radiation in both directions, and if you are the colder of the two objects, the other one is losing heat to you.
There is a principle in optics that says that for many situations you can think of rays of light or you can think of rays going in the opposite direction. You can pretend your eyes send out measurement rays of some kind. This method is perfectly useful in some kinds of analyses, for example the ray tracing computers do to artificially render a scene. It’s great to do it this way, because you are only calculating the rays that will matter.
I see no reason you couldn’t treat the cold body in a warm room situation as radiating rays of cold, even though it is a convenient fiction.
Heat and cold are both plenty real. The only assymetry to this statement is that heat is associated with a positive energy, whereas cold is associated with a deficit of that energy.
I’m feeling really bad about my thing now.
Light bulbs emit light and radiate heat.
To generate cold (and emit dark), you need to invent the dark bulb.
I’m aware that there are various articles out there in which people have tried alternative explanations for light (light sources being called ‘darksuckers’, for example) - I think I’m right in saying that they all fall down eventually, not matter how hard they try (and some of them try harder than others).
There’s an old gag about how light bulbs don’t emit light, they suck dark.
If only I’d known.
I had a co-worker who felt like she radiated cold energy. She had these unnaturally icy hands. Shake her hand and it felt like she’d been holding her mitts in the fridge or something. Ironically she had a very warm personality.
I’ve known a few people like that. I think there’s certain conditions, such as anaemia, that can cause cold hands. She’ll probably have cold feet too 
>I had a co-worker who felt like she radiated cold energy.
>I’ve known a few people like that.
I’m like that. In group photos taken in the thermal infrared (of which there are only a few), I’m always the one with black hands. The most inconvenient thing is that I often can’t trigger automatic things like washroom faucets and towel dispensers.
On cold mornings, I can turn on my 1500W blowdryer in my small, windowless bathroom, and have it heated in just a few min. On a hot summer day, however, there’s no appliance that will “squirt cool” into the room. What I’d need instead would be a way to remove heat; maybe a window unit or some such where the heat is removed to the outside…or at least to another room in the house.
“squirt cool”
snerk