I think that it is safe to say that midterm 2 went a lot more smoothly than midterm 1.  That isn’t to say that it was perfect, but by comparison it went much better than the first.  I believe that this has a lot to do with the amount of preparation that I put into the midterm.  I also think that being provided the paper ahead of time helped greatly with the preparation.  I was able to read it several time so that when I entered the exam I hardly had to refer to the paper at all.  In terms of learning, I feel that I learned a lot both by reading the paper and researching background information for it.  In my research I learned about embryonic implantation (the attachment of the embryo to the uterine lining).  I also learned about the morula stage of pre-implantation development (where the zygote divides into 2, 4, 8 and 16 cell stages) and also about the zona pellucida which is a sheath that initially covers that embryo prior to implantation.  In terms of more pertinent details of the paper that were left out of the exam, I learned what cloud RNA was and why it was relevant for the researchers to distinguish it from other signals.  From what I understand cloud Xist represents a functional quantity of Xist or, whereas the pinpoint Xist that was seen was not functionally relevant in terms of the phenomenon that was being studied in this paper.  To conclude, being examined on a paper like this forced me to consider details about the paper that I would have normally shrugged off or disregarded. I was fo  More specifically, I feel like it forced me to take into consideration very small intricacies about the paper, like for example, whether certain controls were valid or not.  As an aside I also remember getting frustrated with the authors use of the word derepression.  To me it seems like a needless double negative, why couldn’t they just use the word activation?  I am sure there is a valid reason for this, but it just seemed unnecessary when I was reading over the paper for the first time.