Singular compactifications and cosmology

We summarize our recent results of studying five-dimensional Kasner cosmologies in a time-dependent Calabi-Yau compactification of M-theory undergoing a topological flop transition. The dynamics of the additional states, which become massless at the transition point and give rise to a scalar potential, helps to stabilize the moduli and triggers short periods of accelerated cosmological expansion.Comment: 4 pages; contribution to the proceedings of the EURESCO conference "What comes beyond the Standard Model?", July 2003, Portoroz, Sloveni