A cool paper by Bell et al has just come out in Nature Communications (abstract and link below). The study uses a hormonal manipulation to investigate the evolution or reproductive suppression in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Similar work has been done on banded mongooses. The national press picked up this recent paper because it was on meerkats, who in the UK are Russian and compare car insurance prices (this statement isn't meant to detract from the quality of the research). However, the response of the public to this work has been a bit odd, read the comments on the bottom of the dailymail coverage. I think these comments highlight the publics lack of understanding of how science works. A large amount of the comments seems to say that this has been known for ages because it was on Meerkat Manor, and so thought the work pointless. But this work is new and novel, providing an experimental approach to testing the hypothesis of adaptive reproductive suppression. What the tv series reported was based on correlational data and theories, but this work has proved it experimentally. I just hope that these comments say more about dailymail readers than it does about the average persons understanding of science and how it relates to semi-fictional soap-opera-style documentaries.

Bell, Cant, Borgeaud, Thavarajah, Samson & Clutton-Brock (2014) Suppressing subordinate reproduction provides benefits to dominants in cooperative societies of meerkats. Nature Communications.
In many animal societies, a small proportion of dominant females monopolize reproduction by actively suppressing subordinates. Theory assumes that this is because subordinate reproduction depresses the fitness of dominants, yet the effect of subordinate reproduction on dominant behaviour and reproductive success has never been directly assessed. Here, we describe the consequences of experimentally preventing subordinate breeding in 12 groups of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for three breeding attempts, using contraceptive injections. When subordinates are prevented from breeding, dominants are less aggressive towards subordinates and evict them less often, leading to a higher ratio of helpers to dependent pups, and increased provisioning of the dominant’s pups by subordinate females. When subordinate breeding is suppressed, dominants also show improved foraging efficiency, gain more weight during pregnancy and produce heavier pups, which grow faster. These results confirm the benefits of suppression to dominants, and help explain the evolution of singular breeding in vertebrate societies.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140722/ncomms5499/full/ncomms5499.html

and a link to that banded mongoose paper:
http://www.bandedmongoose.org/wp-content/uploads/Cant-et-al-2014-PNAS.pdf

I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University