As is currently suggested by the literature, the most reliable methods of improving IQ scores environmentally do not involve improving education as everybody seems to stress but improving environmental factors like birthing conditions (making them more sanitary), breast-feeding, suitable nutrition, proper maintenance of the health of the mother while pregnant, etc. Education obviously helps as well but it is important to remember that one's IQ score is much less relevant than the construct that IQ attempts to capture. Many environmental interventions like special educational programs may improve IQ test scores (for a short period of time) but they do not seem to improve the g construct, which for all intents and purposes is the core of all intelligence and academic tests and also their most predictive part. An increase in your IQ test score does not necessarily mean that you are actually getting smarter; an IQ test score is only useful in its ability to predict one's ability to perform complex cognitive work, and the bulk of that predictive ability is inherent in the g factor, which is not the same as IQ.
And your intelligence is not set for life, just as your height is not. It stablilizes at an early age and then starts to become larger over time until you reach a certain age where it stops growing and then starts to get smaller. Many people criticising the relationship of brain-size with intelligence pointed out that Einstein's brain at the time of autopsy was abnormally small for his supposed intellect, but this was because Einstein's brain (like all brains) shrunk over the period of his adult life.
Regarding g we are still not entirely sure regarding its nature (it is best to view it as a construct that purports to explain real world phenomena at this point; like gravity) but it seems to be related to the very physiological structure of the brain. The thickness of the myelin fat layers within the brain, brain size itself, the glucose metabolism rate, etc. have been found to have some relationship with g. As neuroscience becomes more sophisticated we will see a merging of the 'softer' sciences of psychometrics and psychology with the actual science of the physical structure of the brain, and from this we will hopefully be able to understand the nature of g on a physical level.
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