  We consider the brane gas picture of the early universe. At later stages,
when there are no winding modes and the background is free to expand, we show
that a moving 3-brane, which we identify with our universe, can inflate even
though it is radiation-dominated. The crucial ingredients for successful
inflation are the coupling to the dilaton and the equation of state of the
bulk. If we suppose the brane initially forms in a collision of
higher-dimensional branes, then the spectrum of primordial density fluctuations
naturally has a thermal origin.
