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You know it’s cold when Mickey won’t ice skate with kids and when Russian ballerinas have bus trouble. Even some criminals took聽the day off after Denver’s early Thursday.

“People are just less active. Things just sort of shut down. People aren’t out and about,” said聽Stanford University assistant professor Marshall Burke, who has studied the correlation between changing temperatures and crime rates.

The official low so far this morning for Denver has been -10 F. The record low for this date is -14 F back in 1919.

— NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder)

People awoke on a frigid Thursday to discover events had been canceled and car batteries had simply given up.

It's cold in Denver today.

馃敟 Try to stay warm out there! 馃敟

— Colorado Rockies (@Rockies)

Disney On Ice’s characters had to cancel a skating session with preschoolers from Warren Village Learning Center. The Moscow Ballet, which travels around performing “The Nutcracker,” canceled its聽Thursday night performance in Grand Junction after buses in Wyoming wouldn’t start in minus-31 degree conditions.

The ballerinas weren’t the only ones with car troubles.

Urban Autocare general manager Phil Carpenter said older and low-quality car batteries run into trouble around 30 degrees and below. And oil becomes thicker in the cold, making it harder for the engine to turn. Everything in a car becomes more brittle in cold weather, he added.

“You get in your car and you鈥檙e going over a bump, you hear new rattles, new creaks you haven’t heard before because聽everything’s not moving as freely,” Carpenter said.

Denver police said they weren’t so sure about a connection between cold and a crime drop, but others agreed with聽Burke.

“There is a strong historical聽relationship between聽temperature and crime, and when it gets cold,聽there’s less crime,” said Matthew Ranson, who works at聽Massachusetts-based consulting firm Abt Associates. “People just stay inside.”

Ranson published “” in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2014. For his study, he analyzed month-by-month crime data from 3,000 counties across the U.S. over 30 years.

“Basically, what I聽found is that when temperatures get really warm, violent crime goes up. But when temperatures get cold, all kinds of crime go down,” Ranson said.

He said there are a few theories, but a prevailing one is that colder weather “basically just makes it harder for criminals to find potential victims.”