Two years ago, Japanese doctors diagnosed the 87-year-old inventor with terminal cancer, snuffing his plans to live to 144 years of age and produce up to 6,000 patents (he already has over 3,500). His demise, they predicted, would fall around 31 December 2015.

"I only have 15 days left to live," Dr. NakaMats, told me solemnly in his basement Tokyo office, strewn with his past inventions, when I went to visit him on 17 December 2015.

But if the inventor has his way, he will prolong his lifespan the best way he knows how: inventing his own treatment. He's already made it to see the new year in.

Dr. NakaMats is an eccentric Japanese inventor and self-professed polymath whose biggest single claim to fame is for licensing the floppy disk to IBM corporation in the 1970s (though IBM disputes details of the story).